alt Hacker News> OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky
In my teens my friends and I watched probably hundreds of DVDs, and they almost never had a problem. Skips & freezes were almost only ever a factor for highly scratched copies, more typical of those from Blockbuster than anything we picked up in the $5 bargain bins.
I don't think I've ever encountered a "finicky" player, either. I don't even know what that'd mean.
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About half of the DVDs and Blu-rays I get from the library skip at some point in my PS5. They're usually not visibly scratched, though usually the scratches that matter are on the top not the bottom.
I started just ripping everything when the studios started adding unskippable ads... I had a rental copy of Friday, still have never actually seen it, there was a bad scratch and it froze after 30+ minutes of unskippable previews.
I've never had a really bad player though... I have seen players that had issues with burned disks, but not mfg (unless scratched rentals).
I have programmed well over hundreds of DVDs, and I can assure you, there were finicky players. Apex players were infamous on how cheap they were, and finicky is an appropriate word. DVD had a spec, and there were parts of the spec that Apex players did not do well at all. The spec allowed for random play. Apex players cheaped out on an PRNG type of ability and came with a saved preset list of random values. If you programmed a disc with random playback, it would playback exactly the same way every. single. time. It really sucked when we were programming games using the random feature. The spec allowed for 99 titles. Any where over 50 titles, and there was a better than not chance that an Apex player wasn't going to even recognize the disc. There were other quirks too, but I'm hoping the point was made