Why is that I can burn and listen to a CD or DVD on my PC, but not on an actual dvd or cd player.?

Question

I recently purchased a new dvd burner, however when I burn a cd or a dvd, it plays on my pc, but not on my DVD or CD burner. Also whenever I try to format my DVD it cannot format, and states that there is a protection on the DVD, is there anyway I can work around this problem, and start burning CDs and DVDs that will actually play on a CD or DVD player?

Answer 1

There may be many reasons

a) Your player supports only DVD-R and you try with DVD+R, DVD-RW or DVD+RW - make sure you use compatible media

b) You created a "data" DVD and not a DVD in DVD-video format

c) You did not finalize your DVD

Answer 2

My guess is that you're not using the right CD/DVD formats.

On a CD, there are several very distinct formats. If you just drag files to a blank CD on Windows, you probably get the ISO9660 format, also known as "Data CD". This is entirely different than an audio CD, and most CD players will only play audio (CDDA) discs. In theory, you can burn a CDDA disc using Windows Media Player (go to the "Burn" tab).. make sure it says "Audio CD".

Similar things apply to a DVD. Now, there's only one "kind" of DVD, they're all data DVDs, formatted with either the ISO or the UDF format, usually the latter. But to make a DVD-Video disc, there are very specific directories and files that must be in place.. most DVD players don't just play any old video file you drag to the DVD disc. Files must be encoded as MPEG-2 or MPEG-1, at very specific resolutions.. similar with audio. You need a DVD Authoring application to do this. You can find more information about DVD Authoring here: http://www.videohelp.com

Now, if you're correctly authoring your DVDs and CDs, it's still possible they won't play your gear, but the ought to play on some players. There's no guarantee that CD players handle CD-R or DVD players handle DVD-R, but most modern players do. But unlike the computer, only very specific formats are understood by these much simpler devices. The videohelp site has a page for looking up your DVD player; users report their success and failure with playback on a variety of devices there.