Mac Forum / Country Specific / Australian Mac Group / January 2008

I have made a DVD of a local musical production and the First Act was
quite long.  The final version comes to well over the length for a
single layer DVD. Normally when that happens, I use a compressor program
like DVDRemaster to bring it back to a length short enough to fit the
DVD, and that has usually had good results. In this case, with HD
instead of DV, I don't want to compact it as I have discovered it makes
a far more noticeable degradation of quality when shown on an HD TV
screen.

So, I bought the only DVD+R 8.5 GB dual layer blanks I could find in
town (small town! :)) which were [K_Mart] Imation.  In each case, with a
different burner each time, I got a similar message at one point:
something like

The drive reported an error
Sense Key - ILLEGAL REQUEST
Sense Code = 0x24
INVALID FIELD IN CDB

The disk was written in each case (though I suspect the leadout may not
be wirtten properly) and play quite well on a MacPro or MacMini, but
through the DVD player connected to the HD TV, each of the three discs
fails at some point - usually right near the end.

I used Toast 6.0 to burn these DVDs but there are several things that
could be the problem:

The Imation DVDs are of inferior quality (I know this is an issue with
single layer DVDs - that some blanks are just not good enough)

and/or

My version of Toast is not up to it or there is some setting for DVD+R I
don't know about

and/or

The DVD player isn't up to it. On the other DVD player I own, it simply
refuses to try to read the DVD+ disc at all

or

something else.....

Anyone there with experience in burning HD DVDs with Dual Layer media
(or with top quality compaction of HD movies to single layer disc) who
might have an idea?  The burners were two different Pioneer DVDRW
SHM-165P65 drives - one internal and one USB - and one Lite-on DVDRW
SHM-165P65.  Anyone know of really reliable dual layer blanks?

Rifty