I have a new white intel MacBook and I have had trouble playing a number of DVD-9 discs. All of which are legitimate DVD video discs. Usually I can hear the drive spin three times as it tries to read it then spits out the disc. The weird thing is that the first few times I used the discs they worked fine but recently it hasn't been able to read the same discs that it used to. I thought it might be a problem with my drive, either faulty or dirty, but it reads other DVD video and data discs ok. Is this an Apple hardware problem? Can it be fixed so I can use DVD-9 discs properly?
I had the same problem as you except my computer could never read the discs correctly. It would read regular dvds just fine but if I tried to play a burnt dvd9 it would spin spin spin and then just spit it out. The drive I have now reads the discs but its still very picky. For example, If I burn the disc with the macbook pro's own disc drive it will read the disc no problem, whether I pop in to the internal drive or if I pop it in to an external drive.
If I burn the disc on another computer or with an external drive connected to the macbook pro, the results are that it'll read the disc but it won't play smoothly if its a video. This happens whether I'm trying to read the disc from the internal drive or the external drive.
For example I burnt a converted version of the dark knight blu-ray onto a dvd9 with an external drive and I popped it into the macbook and at certain parts of the movie it'll crash the boxee player. This happens whether or not I'm using an internal drive or an external drive. I then copied the movie to the hard drive and it'll play perfectly. I was thinking maybe it was a limitation of boxee reading off of the disc drive.
I then burnt the same file on a dvd9 except this time I used the macbook's internal drive. Well what do you know, the file now plays perfectly from the internal drive OR the external drive.
In the end what I found out is that my replaced drive can read discs but it still has some problem streaming data right off of it in real time. It will read the data just fine and I can copy it to my drive.
I also found out that theres something about the macbook pro's internal drive that makes the burt disc more Mac friendly. The fact that the internal and external drives perform similiarly based on how I burn the disc tells me that Mac's don't like discs that aren't burnt from one of the internal drives. I personally don't get it but now I know that I should use the internal drive to burn dvds.
