iMac Data DVD unreadable on PC !!

[bp2kw7]

I just burnt 4.5GB of files as a data DVD on my iMac and then found that it does not open on my Compaq notebook which has a CD-RW/DVD combo drive.

Could someone explain why this is so - and whether there is a solution?

I intend to burn all my music mp3 files onto DVD in the same manner and will then need to play them on my PC.

Thanks in advance.

 

[ftaok]

How did you burn the DVD? Did you use a format that PCs could read?

 

[Sun Baked]

A Mac Volume won't open on the PC unless you have something like this MacOpener 2000 running on the PC.

You have to use a format that both machines can support.

[Note: don't know about DVD support with this program, it's just an example.]

 

[Horrortaxi]

Sun Baked nailed it. PCs don't read Mac disks. Macs do, however, read PC disks.

Edit: With 3rd party software you can burn a disk that Windows can read. Look into Toast Titanium. Also, there is software that will allow Windows to read Mac-formatted disks. No idea what it is or how well it works, I just know it's out there.

 

[sageenos]

In the case of cds, there's some command line utility built into panther for converting a folder of files into an iso image. Burn the iso to disk and it should be readable to Windows.

I'm not sure about dvds however. There's probably an iso format for dvds, but I'm not sure how to create one on OSX.

Toast would probably be your best bet, but the software is so expensive... you'd think OSX would have better disc burning software built in.

By default, Mac OS X burns CDs that support the cross-platform ISO 9660 standard and DVDs that can be read by both Macs and PCs. If you have numerous, or extremely large, documents you can burn the files on several CDs, or if your Macintosh has a SuperDrive, burn them onto a single recordable DVD-R disc. A DVD-R disc can hold up to 4.7GB of information (almost eight times the capacity of a CD) and can also be read using a Windows PC with a DVD-ROM drive.

This comes from
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/windows/

This has not been my experience with the Disk Utility app. I burn discs that are mac only, single session, and are extremely slow to read (I've tried other discs and those read fine, but the ones I've burned take forever to read). I tried a minute ago to make a CD image with Disk Utility and it kept saying the the device was busy or something...

 

[WM.]

Re: iMac Data DVD unreadable on PC !!

Originally posted by bp2kw7
I just burnt 4.5GB of files as a data DVD on my iMac and then found that it does not open on my Compaq notebook which has a CD-RW/DVD combo drive.

Could someone explain why this is so - and whether there is a solution?

I intend to burn all my music mp3 files onto DVD in the same manner and will then need to play them on my PC.

Despite what everyone else is saying, I'm not convinced that this is normal. Certainly I've been successful using CDs I burned with OS X on PCs (running Win2k). As for DVDs, you want to burn in UDF format. Now, when OS X burns a CD, it'll burn it with both an HFS+ (Mac) and an ISO 9660 (everything else) filesystem on it. This is transparent on both the Mac and the PC; you can force your Mac to mount the ISO image instead of the HFS one if you want. I'm looking into how to do this with DVDs (so you could use your Mac to confirm that the DVD was burned properly), but I'll need to get back to you on that tomorrow.

But I think it would be useful to first establish: what version of OS X are you running?

WM