Stuttering movie playback

Hi!
I have recently noticed that movies I watch using VLC and Quicktime halts for a few second during playback. This occurs every few minutes.
I have checked the Activity Monitor and it seems like there is a peak in the Disk Activity coinciding with the moments of the halts.
I have tried repairing disk permissions, and also disabled the "Put disk to sleep..." option.
I also seem to get the same thing when watching streaming movies.
Does anyone else experience this? Is there any problems with my hard drive?

I'm having exactly the same problem. It started in the last few months. The only way to watch a movie from My 1tb Western Digital External Drive in front row is to back out of the movie and resume playback. Every ten minutes or so the screen gets pixilated and when it clears the sound is out of sync. I have tried using the other common video playback applications such as VLC, Quicktime, Plex, etc. Nothing seems to straighten out. I did notice that a large MKV file that I had ended up being corrupted. I'm hoping that all of my video files aren't going to end up that way. There are a few hundred on there. Can a hard drive just take a dive like that or is there some underlying issue with the reading of information by the Mac itself? Thanks for any insight.

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