Unable to burn a DVD (Mac)

[kayar]

First, I should say that I'm quite new to this. I've already learned quite a bit in the past day, but not enough to get it to work, of course. This is a bit of a saga, so bear with me.

Originally, I was trying to burn an .avi file onto a DVD. It was too long, so I downloaded something to split it. That worked perfectly, and the two files play fine in VLC, so I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Then I burned part one of the .avi onto a DVD using iDvd - which seemed to go fine, until I tried the DVD, and found that while the audio was fine, there was no video - just a green screen.

I thought it might have been an error with iDvd, so then I tried a variety of other programs to burn - Burn, DVD Creator, Express Burn...possibly a few others, I don't remember. I got error messages on all of them saying that it wasn't able to burn. So. I then installed ffmpegX, and converted the .avi files into DVD. Again, everything worked fine. Now, I'm stuck with the same problem of how to burn it onto a disc. I've tried burning (through Burn and ExpressBurn) using the VIDEO_TS files and got a message that the burn failed at the end. I've also tried using the dvd.img through Disk Utility, and I believe one other program as well (ExpressBurn?). Same problem.

Any help would be much appreciated. Pulling out my hair here.

[kayar]

Okay, trying to be more useful here by including error messages...

I'm getting messages like "The device failed to respond properly, unable to recover or retry" and "Error with write address." Does this sound like a hardware problem?

[Tedness]

It could be software, it could be hardware, its sometimes hard to determine. Make sure other programs aren't trying to have access to your dvd drive and then try a different brand of blanks. I had a similar problem a few years ago when my imac's super drive quit burning dvd's out of nowhere. Easy way is make sure no other programs are running that would access the dvd drive, then try other blanks, if still acting up, well i hope your mac is under warrenty so they would replace the drive free. I hope this helps.

Good luck,

Ted

[kayar]

Thanks, Ted. It seems it was a problem with the hardware, since I tried using an external disk drive and it burned perfectly.

[Tedness]

You're welcome, best of luck replacing the faulty hardware.

Cheers,

Ted