vlc reads only part of DVD

[Antonio Piccolboni]

Hi,
I've been using vlc for a few times succesfully, but I tried today with a
new DVD and I could see only the last third of the movie and some
commentary. No way I could access the first two volumes. I tried to
remember what had changed since the last time I used it and I believe I
upgraded the kernel from 2.4.2 to 2.4.3. Looking a the mailing list
archive I found potentially relevant info saying that since 2.4.1 there is
a bug in the IDE -cdrom driver. It might apply, but

1) I am sure I used vlc with 2.4.2
2) I can't downgrade to 2.4.0 for other reasons
3) It strikes me as very unlikely that a driver like IDE cdrom doesn't get
fixed in 4 minor releases (it's not a parallel port microscope, it's the
most common peripheral in the nearby universe)
4) Xmovie makes a pathetic attempt at reading the first volume (and then
crashes with loud noise). If there is a bug in the aforementioned driver,
Xmovie seems to bypass it at least for a while.
5) The drive mounts fine and I can do anything else with the files (well,
I haven't opened them with emacs, not yet)

To try to fix the problem, I upgraded vlc to the latest version (from
.80), to no avail. Any words of wisdom? Thanks

Antonio