My revB 12" PB seems to have developed a faulty combo-drive

. It stutters during DVD playback (the powerbook still responds, just the DVD playback stutters), I have huge problems ripping CDs in iTunes, it stalls halfway through and crashes iTunes. Sometimes when I put an audio CD in (clean disc, with no scratches, no copy protection etc), the drive just clicks repeatedly and then ejects it again. I've only had the problem develop while watching DVDs or trying to rip and encode CDs, but once it's happened it won't read data discs either.
Is this just a hardware failure on my drive, or is there anything software related I can try to fix it? I think this is probably just a hardware failure, and I'll have to send it into applecare. Does anyone else have any recommendations before I try that?
Cheers,
Thorin