I just got my first LD player in yesterday, a DVL-700. It works mostly fine, but I'm having one little issue with it and wanted to get some advice. Basically, the player will play side A perfectly fine, but when it flips to side B it will play for approximately 20-40 seconds, then the video will loop for about 5 seconds. You can fast forward through the looped part and play will usually resume as normal. It might get stuck in a loop again, but if the disc makes it past the 2 minute mark it will play the rest of the side with no issues. I watched the Criterion Robocop all the way through, and did some test plays of various other discs, and it did it on every one once switching to side B.

I'm pretty technically minded, and work on video game systems all the time, but seeing as how this is my first laserdisc player I obviously have no experience with working on these, so any advice would be helpful! I should note that this was shipped to me, so it's very possible that the post office dropkicked it or something.

Common issue with some of the DVL-models.
Possible solution is to clean the upper metal guide rod (the optics slides on it when you play side B) and then re-grease it. The grease could be dried up or stiffened so the optics get stuck at some point.
If this doesn't solve the problems, you might have cogs with missing teeths on the laser optics and they will need to be replaced.

these are great players and you should contact Grasshopper as he knows the 700 very well.
good luck with it.

Thanks for the tip, I just opened her up, cleaned and greased the sled and any other moving part that should have grease. This thing was almost bone dry, there was very little trace of the original lubricants in there. I just tested it with 3 of the discs I tried last night and they all worked after the flip without missing a beat. Opening/closing/flipping also sounds much more smooth.

Thanks again!

I'm glad I could be able to help you with the problem!