Burned project in iDVD, but won't play in DVD player

[FredGarvin]

Hi. I just burned my first DVD on my new Mac Pro. Edited with iMovieHD, then exported to iDVD6, encoded and burned (as a movie, not as data) with the Best Quality setting. The finished product plays perfectly in my computer drive, but when I put it in my Toshiba DVD player, it refuses to load. In fact, it locks the player up so badly that I had to unplug it, then hold the eject button as I plugged it back in just to get the disc out.

The disc is a 16x Verbatim DataLifePlus DVD-R single layer. I made two copies, and it happened with both. My Toshiba player is compatible with both plusR and minusR media, and has no problem playing discs (plus and minus) that other people have burned for me.

Is there something special that has to be done during the encoding/burning process to make discs playable in consumer players? If I'm going to be producing video discs for clients, I need to make sure that I do it in a way that maximizes compatibility with the broadest range of consumer players. Thanks for you help!

 

[Makosuke]

The partial answer is no, there's nothing special you need to do to get it to work--as long as you do the burn from within iDVD, it should produce a completely normal DVD. (If you use iDVD to create a disk image, you do need to be sure to burn the image using Disk Utility, not just drag and drop it using the Finder, however--I've seen people make that mistake.)

-R should be (if anything) the more compatible format, Verbatim is a decent brand, and if your player works with other burned DVDs there's no reason it shouldn't work with those.

The only thing I can think of is you got a bad batch of discs and while the computer's drive and software is more tolerant of whatever's wrong with them, your set top player chokes. Stranger things have happened--either try re-doing the whole encode-burn process with another disc (maybe from farther down in the stack), or buy a different brand and see if the results are different...

 

[FredGarvin]

First, I'm going to try the disc in some friends' players this weekend. I'll let you know what happens.

This was a short-notice project that I had to throw together fast, so I used iDVD. I'm about to buy Final Cut for all of my future editing. I'd like to get your suggestions on a good DVD authoring program that works great with Macs and Final Cut. Is there one that stands out? Thanks!

 

[FredGarvin]

Disc works fine in a Sony player, so that's that. Thanks for your time!