Powermac G4 won't play dvd-r...

[evernaut]

Hey guys...new to the forum & a recent convert over from the dark side

I bought a s/h powermac G4 450 recently ( running Panther) & I just love it..

There is one downside however: before I got rid of my pc I backed up heaps of music projects, photos, .avi files etc. etc. onto dvd-r thinking that the dvd-ram drive in the G4 would read them ok ( since it reads cd's, commercial dvds & even cd-rs burned on the pc just fine).

But it doesn't seem to want to play ball...the discs just spin for a bit & then get spat out. I should add that I finalised the discs & checked em on the pc and they worked fine.

So..before I rush out & buy a new dvd-r drive to replace it, I was just wondering if there could be any solutions to this without spending $$?

thanks so much!

 

[mklos]

Its probably just as easy to get a new drive. If you want an exact SuperDrive thats used in today's PowerMacs, you can search eBay and get one thats supported for things like Finder DVD Burning, iDVD, iTunes, etc.... Apple uses specific drives for iDVD that will ONLY work with a few selected DVD Burners. So if you're into using iDVD, this is the route you'll need to go.

If not, then any ole DVD-RW drive will work fine for most tasks.

 

[kex215]

Were they made on a win XP computer, and what burning software did you use?

They may simply have been data disks formatted so that they can't be read by a macintosh.

Do you have a friend nearby who has a mac? Take it over there and try it before you buy a new drive-could just be the disks you made.

 

[evernaut]

They were done on Win XP yeah..through Nero. I put some data on cd-r too, also burned thru Nero, and they work fine - which made me think it probably wasn't a Windows/Mac compatibility issue.

I've decided to get a new dvd-rw drive anyway - seems there's some models like LiteOn which work really well with Macs.

Cheers for the help everyone!

 

[CanadaRAM]

Older Mac drives could only handle DVD-R format, not DVD+R

 

[evernaut]

Yeah, I know. These were regular dvd-r though.