Okay I’m fully aware of how ridiculous this sounds in 2023, but bare with me.

I have a wonderful neighbour, Jackie. She’s in her mid-sixties, and ever since she moved in we have become very good friends, she’s like a second mom to me.

Jackie loves movies and has an enormous DVD collection. One day, she was talking about how she couldn’t find a particular movie, and I said “I can probably download that for you!” Her immediate reply was “Can you put it on a DVD?” I tried telling her the many reasons it would be better to use a myriad of other solutions, but she insists on DVDs.

I did them for a while using DVDStyler on Windows, and it worked fine. But then I installed EndeavourOS on a new partition on my hard drive, tried using Brasero and Devede but it wouldn’t read on her DVD player. Then I tried DVDStyler on my Linux partition, and it didn’t work on her DVD player, despite saying the operation was successful on my end. I then tried booting up into Windows and using DVDStyler, and that also didn’t work, not even letting me burn the disc. Does anyone have any ideas what could fix this? I’ve tried playing around with the settings in all these apps but I couldn’t figure it out.

Apologies if this isn’t the best place to ask this, but I figured a community of pirates would understand my desire to get movies to Jackie without her having to pray to find them in a pawn shop!

  • SpikesOtherDog@ani.socialEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Is it possible that the video isn’t properly encoded in the first place?

    Try transcoding to MP4 first and then burning it, even if it is already MP4.

    Did you change DVD spindles recently to a new set?

    Maybe you unwittingly moved from DVD- to DVD+

    Will it play as a DVD on your system?

    • Evkob@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      It’s done this with multiple files, even ones which previously worked. The blanks are from the same spindle, and I’ve also tested with another batch. My PC can’t read them either.

      • SpikesOtherDog@ani.socialEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        I’m guessing your writer is failing.

        Same data

        Same media

        Multiple os rules out malware, mostly

        Without being there to watch and understand your process, I have to assume you know what you are doing and haven’t missed a step in the writing process, such as finishing the disk or whatever. The fact that you are using multiple applications on multiple operating systems lends confidence.

        That leaves the hardware itself. Luckily a new writer isn’t expensive.