not good karma to speak of torrents... they often fall in that gray area... shouldn't effect the playback other than the source might be shady.

not all flash drives (usb sticks) are the same(some corrupt really easy and/or can not handle larger files). also, improper drivers or old usb ports (ie- 1.1) are painfully slow and would cause pc to hang during playback. try moving files onto the HDD(or SSD) to play back. also check the format, they might need a codec pack like this one- http://www.cccp-project.net/ to be able to play.

best method I have found in moving files between my friends has been a little 60Gb HDD. but when using flash drives (sometimes multiple ones in past when 1Gb was expensive) I've found win rar to be my thing- http://download.cnet.com/WinRAR-64-bit/3000-2250_4-10965579.html and par to double secure them - (link missing)

can't find working link to my proggy... here's an all-in-one that I haven't tested so I can't really recommend - http://download.cnet.com/Par-N-Rar/3000-2250_4-10709733.html

 

(1)file might be corrupted, (2) transferred file not properly relocated (3) usb might have a damage pin on the head socket or just an old usb your trying to make it work, (4) something wrong with your pc that it cant play the file (5) tell your friend to throw that usb in the garbage, joke

 

Codecs.

Download Xvid and Divx codecs and install on your friends PC. Depending on how the media was encoded when it was ripped some movies wont play back properly.

It may also be the copying process as well. if it is a large file (4GB+) then there can sometimes be data loss. use something like unstoppable copier to copy from source to USB key.

 

FAT32 has a 2GB file size limit which is the default for flash drives. Format it as NTFS to get around that.

NTFS does deferred writes so make sure you eject the drive before removing.

Neither XBMC or VLC use codecs, if it plays on either of them on one computer but not the other then there is a problem in the copying.