Just decided to watch The Lion King's supplementary materials today for the first time (it's amazing how much of this stuff wasn't on the Blu-ray, at least as far as I remember!). While almost all of it played fine (perhaps with a few warning signs of frames here and there that would immediately skip even when single-stepping), it was not until I got to the final trailer at the end that I encountered a particularly troublesome problem — the film skipping backwards a frame. I have tried multiple times, between quite long pauses, to get this last trailer to play, and not yet succeeded. The disc itself looks fine on that part of the side. Sometimes it's a really dramatic effect, to the effect that it looks and sounds like half of the trailer is actually being played in reverse at normal speed! But I can't get to the end, and after I start receiving problems, it seems to "spread" to more and more of the trailer in the same run, until the entire thing is unplayable.

I assume the problems are with the disc, and since it's just the last couple of minutes this only annoys me slightly (nothing really too annoying to miss is on there) — but I'm also concerned it might be showing a problem with the player instead. Any ideas what invisible problem with the disc, or perhaps problem with the player (not that I've yet spotted it on any other CAV discs, so if it is one of these it's only just developed) might cause this?

Typically, this has to do with a warp. Very full CAV are a real b**ch. With a surface speed equivalent to 5400 RPM, a ripple warp on the edge can be more than the optical pickup can compensate for. The same warp on a full CLV disc would not cause an issue. Playability can (but not always) vary from machine to machine.