[drphoto]

I had an embarassing situation arise recently. I gave a client DVDs containing photo files and they were unable to get them to mount. They reported just getting the 'spinning beachball'. (on a Mac)

The disk were burned from my 17" G4 Powerbook using an external LaCie burner using Toast 6 Lite. I normally never give clients files directly from the laptop. Normally they are transfered to the G5 tower via firewire and processed, but in this case they wanted the raw and jpegs for editing purposes.

 After I burned the disk, I inserted into the built in drive of my laptop to see if they would mount and opened at least one file.

Anyone have a guess as to the problem? I've noticed I get a fairly high number of DVDs that won't verify vs CDs which almost always pass.

Is there a brand of DVD that seems to work better than others?

[patrickperry]

Quality of the media is very important.  Stay away from Memorex and cheap house brands (Office Depot, Staples etc).  I use almost exclusively Verbatim and Taiyo Yuden.  Did you burn it as a single-session or multi-session....you may just need to finalize your disc in order for other DVD-ROM to read it. 

[jqp]

With DVDs there is the additional factor of format - DVD-R and DVD+R. I believe the Macs use DVD-R. And also there is the factor of different capabilities of older DVD-ROMS. The earlier DVD-ROMS were not all that great at reading the different types of DVD-recordable media written by the different drives, considering they were designed before the formats stabilized (DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD+R DL, etc). These problems also happened with CD-ROM drives - I believe the latest CD-ROMs can read just about any CDs, probably the same thing with DVD-ROMs.

For example I burned a DVD with pics, and my Mother's older Dell DVD-ROM would not read it. You can probably do some testing to figure out which formats have the best rate of success with which DVD-ROMs and DVD burners, hopefully someone has done this testing and written up an article.