Are some DVD players more likely to skip than others?
Yes. The difference in quality between various optical drives is enormous. Inexpensive or economy drives are not as good as more expensive drives. Low-quality lasers, poor speed control, poor laser positioning control, inadequate error-correction routines, inexpensive electronics, and loose mechanical tolerances all combine to produce a drive with a higher than average error rate. A cheap DVD player might have a drive that costs around $10 in quantity, while a high-quality drive may cost fifty times that. You don’t reduce the price to that extent without sacrificing quite a bit. This is true for any optical drive, DVD or CD. Since few companies actually manufacture their own optical drives, DVD players from many different companies may use the same drive. The same is also true for chipsets, which are only made by a handful of companies. A cheap player from company ‘A’ may be substantially the same as a cheap player from company ‘B’, even if the brand names and advertising would try to
