Why doesn't my laptop's DVD drive recognize a DVD-RW disc from my home recorder?

[Ivan Seeking]

Does anyone know why the DVD made in our livingroom [-RW] recorder isn't even seen by my laptop's +- RW compatible DVD player/recorder? XP only sees it as an unformatted disk. It plays rented movies just fine.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

For anyone interested: The first problem was that the formatting on the disc wasn't complete. I thought I had clicked the finalize DVD box but must have missed it. After selecting "finalize" again the disc could be seen.

From there, the video was stored as a VOB file. By calling up Win Media player 6.4, I was able to view part of the video, but the player could only find the first chapter and wouldn't play the rest. It appears that later Windows Media Player releases are unable to read these files correctly and there are no codecs available.

There is freeware available for converting these to an mpeg, avi etc but I haven't tried it yet.
http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/vob.cfm

 

[NoTime]

Those things are a PITA.
Dealt with one once for a friend making a movie.
He deleted a source file by accident
He also should have bought a writer for the PC, but...
On the plus side he does do nice work.

They menu blocks they write are not quite standard.
They also don't seem to write the .vob sequentially.

For the Disk I was working with.
The only thing I found that would play the entire disk was Cyberlink PowerDVD, which is often free with purchase of a DVD drive. A regular standalone DVD player either wouldn't or might play one or two segments depending on the specific player.

I was able to edit the menu by hand so that a vob ripper could pull the needed segment out.
It was an educational experience.

 

[J77]

I always use DVDdecyptor and DVDshrink - there are options which allow all compatibility

 

[NoTime]

I always use DVDdecyptor and DVDshrink - there are options which allow all compatibility

There is no encrypting on these disks.

I couldn't find any options that kept them from saying "Invalid Disk Structure"

PowerDVD seems to work by simply ignoring a bad pointer and going on to the next one.
On another(badly scratched) disk I found this feature to produce really weird results.