I have professionals authoring through Macromedia Director an MPEG2
Movie which is having problems "stalling" after 20 mins on 15% of the
units that we've deployed.

Knowing that you research is more general, I wanted to get an
objective opinion through the research that you can do in a short
period of time.

Our maching has 1 GHz VIA Multimedia Chip with 512 MB Ram and a "Free
DVD Codec." The professionals are stating that the "free DVD codec" is
the problem because it isn't legal. It has been checked with third
parties for RAM, CD/DVD Combo Drive and its Motherboard.

First question: Are "free DVD Codecs" legal or faulty?

They are stating that the resources on the machine are not sufficient
enough to run the video at high quality.

First Comment: Isn't quality a question of the source quality and then
you have a choice of compression (ultimately, high or low storage) and
then format (MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI, DVD)?

Second Question: Are my first comments correct? Not being concerned
with final size for a moment, couldn't we get similar quality from
another format; particularly, Windows Media Format (wmv)? In either
case, is there supporting research?

Second Comment: Their file is in MPEG2 format. First they stated it was
playing through Macromedia Director's Projector and didn't need to use
the "free DVD codec." Now they are saying that it does use the codec
through Windows Media.

One point to make out is that their installations were erroring by
trying to install the codec that was already on the target units and
the final MPEG2 movie is 800MB for 8 minutes.

Third Question: Is there any supporting research one way or to the
contrary to the Second Comments; particularly the final MPEG2 file
size of 800MB?

The specs for the content and Director shell are:
 
Director MX 2004 (Version 10.1) using Mpeg Advance Xtra version 1.5
for mpeg playback
 
Video format:
 
Stream Type: Mpeg2 program stream
Width: 640
Height: 480
Frame Rate: 29.970
Interlacing: Non-interlaced
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Mastering-Quality
VBR Type: 2pass_vbr
Video Bitrate 15000

Thank you in advance for your research support.