I backed up a whole bunch of DV files to a data DVD. But when I play those DV files from my external DVD drive, they hiccup and skip as if they’re missing frames. But when I copy the DV files back to my hard drive, they play just fine, with no dropped frames after all. Any ideas.

For best results, always play your uncompressed DV files from a hard drive. Optical drives are slower than hard drives, so it’s not surprising that your video files are skipping when you’re playing them off your external DVD drive.

DV video files are extremely high-quality, uncompressed video files that demand to be played back at approximately 4.5MB per second, which is too fast for current optical drives to read smoothly. The fastest DVD drives available today can read data from DVDs at approximately 2.7MB per second.

So you may be wondering why playing a regular DVD movie in your DVD drive plays back just fine. That’s because a DVD movie typically uses lower-quality, compressed MPEG-2 files, which are smaller and less demanding.