Yes, yes, I know, this question gets asked quite a lot.

Now, I've got Kaffine and VLC installed, but heres the odd thing;

every time I set them to run, my desktop freezes. The mouse moves a few centimeters, then stops, then moves again...nothing functions, except for the little control window on plasmaoids which appear close to the mouse.

I know I have the same problem when playing normal video files with KWin fully enabled (all special effects on).

Any ideas, anyone?

An issue spread across multiple applications would tend to point to a graphics card based issue. Try disabling desktop effects to see if it has any effect.

Even with effects disabled, Amarok turned off, Kopete shutdown and Firefox off...I still get it

If you can, could you switch to a VT, login and check the CPU usage using a program such as "top"?

I went from 3.5 to 4.3 about two weeks ago and only tried to play a dvd a few days ago. My experience was not pleasant, a retail dvd that played perfectly under 3.5 would only play a few seconds then part of the screen would pixelate and skip or jump. I tried Kaffeine, Mplayer, VLC, Dragon Player but no success. Some media players like Mplayer and VLC wouldn't even recognized the media. I tried several other retail dvds but those that played had the same problem while others weren't recognized at all. I'm unsure what I can do do solve this. Why does KDE4 not play dvds yet KDE3.5 does? My system has a AMD Athlon 7750 dual core cpu and 4gb of ram so I obviously have plenty of hp. Thanks in advance.

I also tried using VLC Player but I experienced the same problems like others.

I discovered that I can play them if I open the media with Dolphin and then open the file with any dvd player. This is a work around and not the best solution but it will work. Maybe soon there will be a permanent fix for the problem.