rbaron, it's unlikely your media if it's genuine TY, and it's not CloneDVD2 IME. I have read through your thread and paraphrasing all the info you have supplied so far, it doesn't provide much to go on. There are three "most likely" scenarios which come to mind.
The kind of problem you are experiencing is more usually attributable to the way the ISO has been written to the blank. If the written disc is the problem, then the disc playback will behave the same in all players. If it's the player, then it'll only be in that particular player. So there's the chicken or egg test.
Startiing with the easist to explain first.
The first is simply the probability of a worn out burner (motor or laser) or simply a faulty burner if it's new and causing this problem on burnt titles consistantly. Seldom is it firmware bug related IME, but there's an outside chance it could be, especially if you're using a hacked revision. I had a problem with one of the firmware revisions on my Pioneer once, but its effect was to make the drive behave erratically at one particular burn speed with particular media which probably wasn't correctly entered in its table. You can discover your burner's firmware revision reported at boot or with it's flashiing util.
Read the further considerations before jumping to the conclusion it's a faulty burner.
It might also be a malfunctioningg power supply providing insufficent or intermittent power or inconsistant voltage to the burner when it spools up to write, especially if you're writing at faster speeds. This can be observed from your burner's behaviour if it appears to be having trouble trying to accelerate to speed and fluctuating in maintaining it.
Those are both less likely, but both possible.
Next, IME using pretty much every popular ripping and burning app out there including DVDdecrypter, DVDshrink, Nero Recode 1 & 2, DVDfab decrypter, plus others and of course CloneDVD2, the most common cause of stuttering / intermittent freezing during playback not being a fault of a faulty or flawed playback device per se, is multitasking with your PC when actually burning. It doesn't matter that DMA is enabled and functioning on your DVD-RW drive, when bus contention and demand from other intense HD activity occurs, it will take precedent which insofar as I can determine appears to effect the HD's data delivery rate. If it drops below a satisfactory level for the writer's buffers to maintain adequate data for the burn rate, it can result in a visible pause during playback, possibly because of the way the writer handles the empty buffer and data delay during the write. Some mobo chipsets traffic handing of HD contention are more prone to this than others.
Multi-tasking when ripping to ISO on your HD, with or without compression, won't effect a stutter in the consequent burn IME, but using the PC for anything during the actual burn of ISO to DVD blank during the burn can, including something as simple as an anti-virus or windows auto-update or auto-mail server check running in the background without your awareness or in your absence.
In over 1000 separate titles burnt this year, I've experienced only a very few (2, perhaps 3?) freezing or stuttering results, and they were initially before I discovered that multi-tasking during the burn to blank always runs a risk of inducing them.
Here is what I do for successful results. I always rip to HD first, and I always burn at max rated speed of the media, which these days is usually 16x. I always use quality media, previously TY but with a preference these days for Verbatim and dedicate the PC soley to the task of the burn (to blanks) whilst that actual activity is taking place.
And just to reiterate, when ripping the original disc to ISO on the HD, you can do multitask as much as you want. It won't incite stutter or freezing in the resultant ISO. My results are consistantly flawless.
Hope something in there is of assistance to you. GL. 8)
PS: I use SONY & Pioneer burners.