DVD recorders

Hmm... Did you finalize the disc after you were done recording on it?
The minus format DVD's need to finalized before you can play them in any
players. Could you play the DVD's on the PC with mplayer, xine, or the
like?

Well, the discs are DVD-R, so they use the DVD-VR format as you pointed
out above, which probably differs slightly from the standard PC DVD
filesystem. I think that's the problem.

I have two DVD players, an early Pioneer DV-505 and a new Panasonic DVD-S47
and a Toshiba DR-1 DVD recorder. The Panasonic player has no problems with
any disc whether DVD-RAM/-R/-RW recorded on the Toshiba, but the older
Pioneer player can't play any of the -R/-RW discs at all. Strangely though,
if I do a direct disc copy on the PC using K3b, the copy done on the PC
plays perfectly in the Pioneer. I did read somewhere that older players
can't handle writeable media that well.

This appears to be a common compatability problem with standalone DVD
Recorders which is not unique to Linux players but also affects many
standalone players. It appears to be caused by the use of the DVD-VR and
DVD+VR formats which use a filesystem that's modified slightly from the
standard used for pressed or PC-written media.

I have 2 players and 1 recorder and so far no disc I've recorded has been
playable by either of the standalone players without ripping them on the PC
and reburning even though using same media on both standalone and PC
recorders.

However so far I've had no problems playing them on Linux (I only have the
DVD Burner and no separate reader, is your laptop's drive a reader or a
burner) so maybe it's a combination of format, player and drive that's
causing your problem?

I tried it under both Gentoo Linux and FreeBSD, with duplicate results.
It's a Sylvania unit, no model #, unfortunately. It's just a dual
VCR/ DVD-R/-RW unit. I'll try vobcopy as Peter suggested. It's one of
those VCR-type DVD recorders, BTW, not the digital ones you hook up to a
computer. Forgot to mention that. ;-(

I would suggest trying it under Windows and see what happens.
Might be a defective unit.
Might be defective Linux/freebsd.

begin Donn Miller wrote:

Yep, that is definitivly a firmware bug in the recorder.
Just two days ago some friend of mine came along with a DVD-recorder which
exhibited similar quirks. Luckily there was a patched firmware available

try "vobcopy" and see what output you get
--
Who the fuck is General Failure, and why is he reading my harddisk?