Shoutbox

The problem can be heating... but this is rare...
The problem can be the player... but this is also many times not realy the cause, although it can fix it (temporarly).

The most common problem (note, I say "common" as many other things can cause it though) with this is your combination of CPU and HDD which can't handle the datastream.  This sounds strange but when you are playing a dvd, you most likely aren't doing much else. This can cause your HDD to go into diagnostic mode and eating up some resources. Or another background task can sometimes keep the CPU accupied for a brief moment (long enough to drop the resources available for the player and thus cause hickups).

This could be solved by some players, although this is not realy solving the problem as all players have this. That's to say, with all software it can happen as it is simply how Windows works; it devides its resources among its running programs. It is only a matter of how intesivly a program is running.

A very quick fix and which I found always worked in whatever situation is simply to increase the priority level of your player in Windows Task Manager (right click the process and choose priority level. Set it higher as "normal"). Doing this will tell Windows to arrange his resources more to the player than to other possible running programs.

Another common cause is a HDD diagnostic/defrag/monitoring program which kicks in; because you don't use your HDD for quite a while it thinks it can do some stuff. Note that some of these diagnostic programs are put into the hardware itself (S.M.A.R.T diagnostic feature) and can only be disabled by specialized software. And because some players do use the HDD as a cache this again can make that the player experiences hickups.

A more rare cause can be your DVD player which has some troubles reading the most outer parts of a CD/DVD. As the CD/DVD is read from the inner circle to the outer circle, the speed of spinning needs to increase a little to keep the data flow consistant. Some DVD players could have troubles with that. But as said, this is rare..... but it can happen...