I recently got a Pioneer A05. The main uses are for data backup and to burn fansubbed anime so that my Mom can watch them (imagine, a 57 year-old anime otaku!)

I authored a disc using the included MyDVD software, nothing fancy - no menus or chapters - just a single 40 minute video, and burned it to the bundled blank DVD-RW to test it. The resulting disc would not read at all from my DVD-ROM (no surprise, it's 4+ years old), but it also would not play from the A05 (normal DVD's autoplay fine on this system using either drive). If I manually select the VOB on the disc, though, it plays fine. The kicker is that if I stick the disc into my DVD Player (recent Sony 5-disc changer), it loads and plays flawlessly.

I then tried making a simple menu. Same deal, except the menu VOBs won't play at all even when manually selected. Again, works flawlessly on the set-top player, including menus.

Both, when burned to DVD-R, work flawlessly on both set-top and A05 (my DVD-ROM seems incapable of reading any burned DVD media).

Any insights as to why the DVD-RW might be having this quirky behavior?

JP