Movies playing in HUD cause game to pause

Hey everyone. I have a problem that's driving me crazy. Whenever a in-game event happens that calls a video to display on the HUD(Jaff's, distress call, ect.) the game pauses for 30 seconds, or longer, before playing the movie and sound. It does not crash just pauses. Speed throughout the rest of the game is smooth. As you can imagine this is very frustrating with the game pausing every few seconds! I've tried the suggestions in the game faq's, but no luck. I've defragged my HD. What's really annoying is that this did not happen at first, and I can't figure out what changed. Any ideas?

thanks.

All of the videos are stored on the cd, so I assume your problem is with the cd drive. Do you know the speed of the drive? Has it given you any problems before?

I'd suggest copying the videos from the cd drive to your hard drive. To do this, open up disk 2, and copy the movies directory to your eoc directory. You may have to move it into your streams or resource folder, but I forget where it goes exactly.

I have exactly the same problem. When I was about halfway trough Act 2 the game suddenly started freezing for 20-30 seconds every time someone sends a radio message. I haven't made any changes to my graphics/sound drivers or hardware, so I have no idea what's causing the freezes.

Ericman: since the radio message "videos" are rendered with the in-game graphics engine(just like any other 3D object in the game), playing them does not require accessing the CD. You are probably confusing the radio messages with the intro/outro movies, which are AVIs.

Playing the game with these pauses requires insane amounts of patience, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Well it seems that I've pinpointed the problem a little more, although still no fix. The pauses do not happen the first time I load a saved game, only after I die(which is a lot), and reload a game... then I get the pauses...

Well, in my case the pauses start after I've been flying for a while. Dying doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. Sometimes I can play half an hour without problems, sometimes the first message I get causes a freeze. After that, only rebooting helps, restarting the game has no effect.

The radio messages from clay, cal, little cal, az, lori, jafs, and smith are all movies from the cd actually. It is only in other messages where it shows the ship that the engine loads it. I'd still suggest giving my method a try. It might help a little bit, or not at all. Does it really hurt?

If that doesn't work, we're probably going to need to know what hardware you guys have running in your systems.