What causes DVDs to freeze up?

knight1024

What causes DVDs to freeze up momentarily? I've bought many professionally manufactured DVDs from big companies over the years and have had several freeze up (pause during playback) while watching them. At first, it seemed to be only on Dual-Layer DVDs (recorded on both sides of disks), but some of them were single layer DVDs.

I recently watched a DVD of "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" Theatrical and Extended Special Edition which was recorded on both sides of the disk (because of the length of the extended version). It paused during playback (for two or three seconds each time) in two different parts of the movie. This disk did have some scratches on it on one side (not deep), but many other DVDs that I've bought have the same problem and had NO scratches on them at all.

I have a Panasonic DVD/VCR recorder and it plays most DVDs fine, even some that won't play right on other DVD players. So, I don't think it's my player. What causes this and is there any adjustment to the DVD player that can fix this problem or is the problem with the disks only?

geno888

When this happen with a burned disc, most of times the cause is a bad burned disc.

Most of times, the cause of the bad burn is a low quality disc.

The solution in this case is to burn again data on a quality disc, like Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden.

A less frequent cause of this problem is a wrong burning speed. In this cause, trying with different speed can improve results, but again if you are using low quality media results will be always poor whatever burning speed you'll use.

Finally, the problem can be in the player itself. You can try to clean the optical pickup, but this is not an easy thing, because sometimes is needed to open the drive (a thing that I'm not able to do )

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knight1024

So when I buy a DVD movie or TV show from a store and it freezes, that means that the professional company that manufactured the DVD used a low quality disc or the wrong burning speed to record the movie? I thought that they would be more professional than that, but I guess not. I also thought that I had read somewhere years ago that dual layer disks sometimes do that, but I can't remember the site or if I'm remembering right.

This leads me to another question: Are there any cleaning disks (like you would buy at Wal-Mart, for example) that would clean the optical pickup in the DVD player (that would not damage the unit) and without having to open the drive? Keep in mind, I'm on a budget, so I can't afford anything expensive. I've always wondered if those cleaning disks are safe to use (never used one).

CDR Sam

on ROM discs the prime offender is fingerprints, dust and scratches.

Panasonic (I have one) has 'funny' speed settings so you can compress much further then a standard DVD-R or DVD+R and make it completely unreadable on another system. This sounds like strictly a DVD-ROM issue

Dual layer discs can pause when it 'switches' over to the next layer during playback.

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geno888

knight1024, sorry, I misunderstood your question

I thought that you have problems with burned discs, not with pressed ones.

Pressed discs can actually give these problems if there is a manufacturing defect on the disc. This happen sometimes, and the only solution is to ask for a replacement from the store where you bought the disc.

A common cause of defects in pressed discs is that the disc is warped, but in some cases the defect is not noticeable with eyes.

Moreover, some standalone are rather picky, so even a little defect make the disc unreadable. In this case, a solution is to create a copy of the disc. Often, computer drives are better readers than standalone players.

Sorry again for misunderstanding your question

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