Is this a hardware problem?

My Inspiron 1525 is 18 moths old.  It originally shipped with Ubuntu 7.10 and LinDVD, but I did a clean install 6 months ago of Kubuntu 9.04 because I love the newer KDE4 desktop.  I no longer have LinDVD on the system and no easy way to recover it.  I use VLC player for watching movies and it works well enough... or rather did work well enough until I tried to watch three different movies on a flight the other day.  VLC wouldn't play any of them, and neither would Dragon player.  The Device Notifier recognized the discs and showed the titles in the New Device notification, but nothing would play.  Is there a way to check the drive for a problem?  It still reads and writes CDs fine.  Alternatively, can I somehow get the backup of LinDVD on my original backup image back onto my system without a complete reinstall of Ubuntu 7.10 and upgrades.  Any other ideas out there?