[cooop]

I own a second-generation Quicksilver Power Mac (dual 1 GHz) and I was recently given several 8cm mini-DVDs that were recorded onto by a fairly new Sony Handycam digital camcorder. Unfortunately, although Sony's website states that the media is recognized by most computers and DVD players, the blank-DVD dialog pops up and forces me to eject the disk. My two year-old Sony DVD player does not react positively to them either (after spinning it for a minute or so, tells me there is no disk inside). Is there anything I can do to force my DVD player or Power Mac to recognize the mini DVD as legitimate? Thanks in advance.

[ast3r3x]

Does it read on other PC's?

[cooop]

I wish I could say, but the Power Mac is all I have at my disposal.

[ast3r3x]

Does the sony dvd camera read the dvd's fine then?

[cooop]

I wish I could say, but I don't have the camera at my disposal, but even if I did, it's USB-2 only... stupid Sony. On the whole, it's a bad situation and I'm in a pickle.

[ast3r3x]

Well I could be wrong, but the format for mini DVD-R's isn't different from regular DVD-R's. Can you visually see information is burnt? I'd say there isn't information on them, or there is a problem with the disc. If your DVD burner can play regular sony DVD-R's, then I'd probably say the disc.

[cooop]

Yes, it does look like data has been burned to the disk. I don't know how the spec differs between full-size and 8cm DVD, but there must be some difference, since this spec page for my DVD player clearly seems to indicate that miniDVD is NOT supported, for whatever reason.

Incidentally, when I insert the disk in my Power Mac, the Finder tells me to initialize, eject, or ignore. I usually press ignore, but the Finder does not mount the disk. I can, however, go into apps like Disk Utility and Toast and "see" it (Toast and a few other "burning" apps refer to it as rdisk1, which I can only assume means RAM disk). I don't think this really helps much as I haven't been able to get past this point (i.e. trying to record from the disk in order to make a copy to burn on a "real" DVD always fails - but this makes sense if the system registers it as a RAM disk).

What do you think would happen if I pressed Initialize? Normally, initializing completely erases the disk, but I don't think that would happen with a DVD-R. Even so, I don't want to put the data on these disks at risk.... Thanks for your continued time.