Slide Show Audio Problem at Beginning of Show

Question

Very strange occurence that I have never encountered and I'm really stumped.
I have a slideshow that was created in Encore CS4 that plays directly after the main menu.  The show begins normally with two blank slides at the head end for timing and to as a fade up from black.  I use cross dissolves between slide. The music begins with a video at 0 level then the video fades in behind it within three ~ 4 seconds. 
Just after or as the first slide advances to the second other close to this point the music stutters for about two seconds then clears up and is fine for the remainder of the show. I felt this was some hiccup with the blank slides or some wierd issue with the audio track so I used a different one and it did the same thing at the same spot.  I the render the slide show in Encore and played it from the beginning--it sounds perfect with either audio track.
I then burned the project to a folder and played the DVD from the folder in a virtual DVD player in Windows--it plays fine.
I then took one of the many disk that I had made while experimenting with different burn speeds and played the disk in the computer dvd drive--the slide show was again fine.
So only when the DVD is played in a DVD player do I have this problem.  This is crazy.  I have done maybe forty different slide show integrations in Encore and never encountered anything like this.  Why would the show play perfectly in Encore and when the burned DVD is played in the computer but not in the a DVD settop player?
This points to the pplayer but this seems odd--what is causing it.  How can I be certain it won't do it in the customer's player?  It does the same thing in another player as well--but it happens to be the same model but if it were a glitch in one player it isn't likely that the same glitch would be in both.  I still think I am missing something here.
Any suggestions please--I can't send this out to the client like this and tell him it's a glitch that I will fix it for obvious reasons.
Thanks!!

Answer 1

It sounds as if for some bizarre reason, the transition is causing the player buffer to empty out.
This happens on certain - usually older - players when sequential cells are set as non sequential in compiling.
(I had this one bite me - hard - recently, although from a different application).
Best way to check this is to go get a copy of the excellent PGCEdit (shareware) and load the compiled disc.
http://download.videohelp.com/r0lZ/pgcedit/index.html
Find the main timeline for the slideshow, and double click it. (see attached image)
The "chapters" will be listed, and we need to see these ticked as sequential playback, or seamless.
If there is no tick, add one between each track, save the disc & reburn with IMGBurn (freeware/Donationware)
http://www.imgburn.com/
For some reason, certain chipsets seem to create a gap when transitioning a chapter marker on a timeline with a single sequential audio stream when the chapter is incorrectly set to non seamless.
This may not be what is happening here, but I think it is worth a look.