The Devil and my DVD Burner January 29, 2006
Posted by David Leslie in Technology.trackback
Here is the saga:
Back in August, my Father-in-Law gave me some blank ESA DVD+R’s that he couldn’t get working with his burner. Since I had a ton of mini DVs of John that I have been desperate to edit and burn onto DVD, I borrowed my Boss’s PowerBook and made a cute DVD called “TumbleTime” of John at his gymnastics class. Throw it in my 5 year old Apex, plays like a champ.
Fast forward to now. I’ve had my new Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) computer since Nov but haven’t really had time to get into the burning of the DVD’s till now. I make my first disc with MCE only to have it not work in the Apex. Same goes for my Samsung 709. Yet when I take the disc and throw it in one of the demo DVD players at CompUSA, it works.
What gives?
I try another program with a different set of files. No joy. I buy a pack of DVD-R since the salesperson told me they work better on older DVD players. Nada.
I take the Mac made disc back out. It plays fine in both.
I copy the Mac made disc to a DVD-R, doesn’t work
I copy the Mac made disc to a DVD+, doesn’t work.
I post to the MCE newsgroup where I’m given the advice to buy another DVD player. Funds are just not there so there has got to be another option.
Don’t know what software you’re using to do the burning, but try setting the burn speed down to 2.4x or so. Some older players don’t like disks burned at high speeds.
Thanks for the info. Come to find out the problem was with something called “Booktype”. Most PC programs leave the disc’s booktype to whatever format the disc is in such as DVD+R. The reason the Mac worked was that they burn the disc as a DVD-ROM which is the universal booktype (but doesn’t allow for any future editing if you have that ability). A few guys pointed me to a program that allowed me to change the booktype, fried a disc and bingo it worked.