This is the first version of Studio I've ever used, so I have no comparison to older versions, but I do like it.

Anyway, yea, it could be the write speed.  Instead of 'auto', try a lower speed and see what happens. Or, if you have another disk-burning software package, like Roxio or Nero, try using that to burn the disk instead.  I've sometimes had flaky results with the Studio disk burning, so now I always just make the file (iso image or video_ts folder, it doesn't matter), and then burn it later with Roxio.  Never had a bad disk doing it that way.