No Sound, Drive Noise, Jittery Image, Background Blue

I just finished setting up my Media Center on Vista Home Premium, got all the latest drivers and SP1 and updates. DVD playback is giving me some trouble though, and I've resorted to playing them on my 4-5 year old DVD player instead, which is just plain stupid when I have this whole machine set up with Vista Media Center. I've experienced several problems:

1) No sound.

I have the sound card stereo cable going into the back of the TV, it's possible that VMC isn't downsampling the 5.1 audio to stereo and that it's outputting it over a different port.

2) Drive noise

VMC spins up the drive, as if it's buffering up, then slows it down, then spins it up again, then slows down. It's really annoying as you can imagine. Is there a way to make it read the DVD video disc at a constant, lower speed? Say 2x or 4x ?

3) Jittery image

When played on a standalone player the DVD is fine. However on Vista Media Center it's a bit "jumpy". You can see this quite clearly for example on the credits, text appears (for example film title) and it's jittery, moving up and down a tiny bit. On the standalone player its perfectly stable.

4) Image colors

There's a warning text at the start of the DVD, the general copyright thing. The background is blue on a standalone player, but when played through VMC it's pink?! Definitely too much red on the output.