video playback crash

[lightman47]

I have a machine running Fedora 14 and a bunch of movies stored on it as '.iso' images. It is connected to my home theater. I used to use VLC to play these movies and it worked great for a long time. About 4 months ago, about an hour or hour-and-a-half into a movie, the audio suddenly "disappears" and the machine goes CRAZY with almost 100% of the CPU spent writing to the SWAP. At first I thought the machine was locked, but it isn't; it's so doggone busy writing swap. I am unable to get enough cycles to terminate anything. I found the swap activity through System Monitor - it was ABRUPT. Sound stopped, machine became preoccupied with swap.
I have removed/reinstalled VLC, the machine has undergone a couple kernel updates, and I have removed/reinstalled a number of things associated with audio (CD ripper, mpeg stuff, etc.) yet the problem persists. I don't know what happened or when (update-wise).
Any body got any ideas? While a solution would be great, I'd also be happy with a couple decent suggestions on what to look for. I am pretty sure audio is the problem. Thanks.

[kurtdriver]

I haven't a clue, but the first thing I'd do is run it from gnome-terminal, that way there are error messages, or does this freeze the machine thoroughly?

Do other .iso movies, or movies outside of isos have this problem? Other players? Probably the second thing I'd do would be to try isolating the problem.

[lightman47]

OH, forgot to mention - all movies play just fine in VLC on other Fedora machines (via network)

[lightman47]

Sorta solved: thanks to kurtdrivers' suggestion, I got errors which I looked up - it appears it's an issue in the latest releases of VLC. I've used Gnome mplayer without issue thus far. Thanks!

---------- Post added at 08:36 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:35 AM ----------

Also - I suspect has to do with that particular video card because VLC works fine on other machines.