DVD-RW unreadable

[acaltha]

Every dvd-rw made with my standalone Panasonic EH50 appears empty on my computer.
My dvd drive is a Philips 1640.

The dvd plays fine on another computer with different dvd drive.

I recently formatted my computer and re-installed windows.
I installed ulead movie factory 4 and the dvd-rw played fine.
However i uninstalled movie factory to see if that was the problem and the discs became unreadable. I installed movie factory again but the discs won't play anymore.

I can't figure out what i did different.

[mats.hogberg]

Are the discs finalized?

/Mats

[acaltha]

Yeah, the discs are finalized and play fine on other dvd players.

[bevills1]

Do dvd-rw made on other recorders play on PC? If not, -rw may be incompatible with PC drive. I have older Toshiba DVD player that plays only -R media and won't play +R, and it's possible the reverse may be true for some other players or drives. The dvd-rw brand could be possible problem too if not on recommended list for PC drive.

[nlec]

I have a similar problem. My Panny ES20 records on DVD-RW blanks and the NEC 3500AG in my PC cannot read them in the "normal" PC fashion. By this I mean if I do "dir h:" from a command prompt I only get a partial listing of what's on the disc, i.e. the top-level directory names VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS. The directories themselves look empty, and a "copy h:*.* /s" returns errors.

I don't know whether to attribute this behavior to the Panny, the discs or the NEC dvd writer in my PC. There is no protection or macrovision involved anywhere that I know of.

Nevertheless, DVD Decrypter is able to see the VOBs and extract them cleanly every time. I wonder sometimes if a different DVD writer would work without those errors.

[acaltha]

Do dvd-rw made on other recorders play on PC? If not, -rw may be incompatible with PC drive. I have older Toshiba DVD player that plays only -R media and won't play +R, and it's possible the reverse may be true for some other players or drives. The dvd-rw brand could be possible problem too if not on recommended list for PC drive.

My dvd drive can write or play -rw's just not the ones made with my Panasonic dvd recorder.