We have a Sony Playstation 2 at my house 
along with a 52 in. television :D. Combine these with the surround sound system and this makes for an execellent home theater. However, I’ve noticed that about halfway through a movie, there is a slight pause. The screen freezes and the sound cuts out. It only lasts for about a second, but it’s starting to bug me. Is the laser changing the “layer” that it is reading? Does this only happen with PS2? Any info. would be greatly appreciated.
I’d go with the laser changing its “layer”.
At a guess this may happen with the PS2 because it wasn’t really meant to replace a dedicated DVD player. Costs are kept as low as possible on those things since, usually, Sony loses money on the sale of every single one (strange but true…they make their money from licensing people to develop games for the PS2).
It wouldn’t even surprise me if this was an intentional ‘feature’. Sony was waffling on the idea of including DVD movie playback in the PS2 afraid that it might siphon sales away from their own line of DVD players. I mean, why not buy a PS2 for DVD movies and get the added bonus of being able to play games? While I have zero proof such a hiccup in the system might be on purpose just to nudge you lightly in the direction of getting a dedicated DVD player. You’ve already said it’s starting to annoy you so it seems to be working.
Every DVD player does that little pause while changing layers. Some are better than others, but the pause is inevitable. Many times they will try to put the layer change after a fade to black so you don’t notice it, but some movies (ie, Armaggeddon) have that MTV style of editing and there isn’t a single static frame in the whole movie. So it pauses a bit.
Go to the Digital Bits review pages and find the listing for one of the movies that gives you one of those slight pauses. At the top of the review, among the “Specs and Features”, you’ll notice a time for a layer switch; for example, The Perfect Storm’s layer switch is listed as being at 1:10:15, in chapter 21. If the pause happens at that time, that’s all it is.
That’s the time your player gets up to pee
Why the heck can’t DVD players have a read-ahead buffer and make the layer transition smooth? It can’t be that hard to do. Does anyone know of a DVD player that does this buffering?
Some (for all I know, all) computer DVD player software reads ahead and does a very smooth layer switch. No idea why standalone players don’t do the same.