Reading a Video CD from a DVD drive on 7.0

[Joshua Isom]

I recently made the upgrade to 7.0, and my girlfriend had some video 
cd's she wanted help with(end result is putting two pal vcd's on one 
ntsc dvd).  I had a couple she'd given me before that were actually 
dvd's so I first put the new ones in my dvd drive and tried using 
mplayer on them, but it locks up with the read big timeout thing that 
I'm sure almost anyone who's messed with dvd's has seen.  Under 6.3, 
that error would do the three tries, and then another three, and quit.  
I didn't not test under 6.3 using an actual vcd so I'm not sure if 
that's specific to the issue or not.  But under 7.0, it'd just keep 
retrying forever.  Since it was locked in device, I couldn't kill it, I 
couldn't eject the disc, and had to forcibly reboot the system.  Now, 
the operating system still worked, but the drive was locked, and the 
kernel could not shut down.  I doubt this is expected or tolerated 
behavior but given that it involves video cd's in a dvd drive trying to 
be accessed as a dvd, I'm not sure it's been seen very often at all.  
Was behavior changed from 6 to 7, or was this just an untested case?  
Does anyone know how best to deal with processes locked in "device"?