Actually that sounds to me like you've got a lot of errors on the disk. There's two things to check for on a burned disk, which are generally checked simultaneously by any diagnostic software that can check for them. These are PIE and POF (parity inner error, parity outer failure). There's a very brief description of them buried in a huge pdf
here on pages 47 and 48. Basically the specification says that a player has to be capable of playing a disk with fewer than 280 consecutive PIEs and if POF > 0 then it can be expected that there will be noticable errors.
The fact that your disk begins to play, and then stops, would say to me that you're burn has a ton of errors in it. I'll have to look around to find something you can scan one of your burns with to check for PIE/POF (I use PlexTools, which comes with my plextor drive.) Very high PIE or any POF can be caused by a lousy drive, but generally I would say it's caused by over-speed burning of media, or low quality media. I won't burn a DVD faster than 2.4 speed, even if it should be rated for it, and my burns end up in the region I would call "excellent" which is Max consecutive PIE < 20 and POF = 0. Something to look into anyway, if the player just had a problem with burned DVDs, it wouldn't recognize them at all. It cutting out like that really points to bad burns.
