[Techtalk] Trouble with DVD

[Akkana Peck]

Mary writes:
> The major symptom is that inserting it into a DVD computer drive (on
> Linux machines) causes all read requests to the drive to block and then
> time-out after a minute or so. (Among other things, this causes Nautilus

It may be an incompatibility between the two drives.

I bought a DVD writer hoping to use it for backups (before I
found out what short lifetime home-burned optical media have).
But what I found was that DVDs burned on my burner could not be
read on most of the other computer DVD drives I tried.
I think we tried about five drives (aside from the DVD writer
which burned the DVD in the first place, which could always read its
own DVDs); two drives could sometimes read DVDs I burned, the rest
couldn't ever read them.  I got slightly better results with one
format than another, but I can't remember which format was more
competible, except that it wasn't the format that most people on the
web recommended as being compatible with most readers.

I gather that some people have much better luck with burned DVDs;
perhaps I just got unlucky and got a bad burner.  But it doesn't
seem too unlikely that a dive shop in Thailand might be using a
cheap generic burner like mine.  If that's the case, the best
bet might be to try a lot of drives (friends' drives?)
and hope you find one that can read it, then copy it from there
somehow using some other medium.

I don't know whether movie DVD players are less picky than computer
DVD-ROM readers; I don't do much with video beyond short clips from
a digital camera, so I've never tried recording a video DVD.

	...Akkana