I received a couple of DVDs from a friend who recorded his vacation on them, and I wanted to make DVD player-compatible copies so that I could keep the originals in good condition. I burned them to blank DVDs a couple of different ways, and found a few results:
1.) If I created a DVD .cdr master in Disk Utility, and burned in in DU, the disc played in a DVD player without issue.
2.) If I created a DVD .cdr master in Disk Utility, and burned it with Finder, either through directly burning it or sending it to a Burn Folder first, the disc would not play in a DVD player, because it only made a direct copy of the .cdr to the disc, so the DVD only served as a container for the disc image.
3.) If I duplicated the DVD in Finder with the right-click (or Control-click, for all you sentimental Mac users! ) contextual menu, it duplicated the files on the disc to my Desktop. From there, if I burned them either in DU or in Finder, the outcome was just like option 1: the DVD played fine in the DVD player.
This leads me to conclude that unless a disk image is burned with Disk Utility, it will not actually play properly in a CD/DVD player, but will simply make a copy of the disk image onto the disc via Finder.
Of course, if it is a set of files or folders copied from the disc, then iTunes/Finder, or another app can burn it without issue.
Please correct me if I am wrong in my observations, as I don't want to accidentally keep making non-playable DVDs!
1.) If I created a DVD .cdr master in Disk Utility, and burned in in DU, the disc played in a DVD player without issue.
2.) If I created a DVD .cdr master in Disk Utility, and burned it with Finder, either through directly burning it or sending it to a Burn Folder first, the disc would not play in a DVD player, because it only made a direct copy of the .cdr to the disc, so the DVD only served as a container for the disc image.
3.) If I duplicated the DVD in Finder with the right-click (or Control-click, for all you sentimental Mac users! ) contextual menu, it duplicated the files on the disc to my Desktop. From there, if I burned them either in DU or in Finder, the outcome was just like option 1: the DVD played fine in the DVD player.
This leads me to conclude that unless a disk image is burned with Disk Utility, it will not actually play properly in a CD/DVD player, but will simply make a copy of the disk image onto the disc via Finder.
Of course, if it is a set of files or folders copied from the disc, then iTunes/Finder, or another app can burn it without issue.
Please correct me if I am wrong in my observations, as I don't want to accidentally keep making non-playable DVDs!