How much time to burn DVD?

2 hrs is too long!

F Shippey's comment confirmed what I had suspected. I quit Disk Utility and received the warning that the burning process was not complete but quit anyway. When I used the Media Eject Key to remove the disk, it would not work. I had to restart the computer in order to remove the disk. Out of curiosity, I tested this disk in the DVD player, and it worked perfectly. I burned another disk, and the entire process was completed successfully in about 25 minutes.

A few days later, I created a modified disk image of the same project. I burned three more disks. With the first two I experienced the same problem as described in my original question. Each time I had to restart the computer to remove the disks with the incomplete burn. For the third one, I burned at 1X. The burn was successful.

Here are the results of the five burns.

1. Two were completed "successfully".

2. Three needed to have me quit Disk Utility without these steps being completed. Here is what didn't get finished:
Closing session
Finishing burn
Verifying burn...
Verifying
Burn completed successfully

3. All five disks play perfectly on my DVD player.

4. Of the two that had successful burns, only one can be read by my computer. This is the one that was burned at 1X. The other gets ejected.

5. Of the three that did not finish the burn process, one can be read by my computer. The other two cannot; they get rejected.

I experimented by inserting two commercially-produced DVD's, and my computer also rejected them! It seems to me that this is a hardware problem rather than a media one.

Any thoughts or advice?

Here is an update to my last post. I have tried all five of the disks in two other computers, another iMac G4 and a MacBook Pro. Each disk could be read by these computers. At this point I can rule out the brand of DVD as the culprit. I have what I think is the unusual problem of a computer that burns disks correctly but cannot read what it has burned.

This is obviously a computer issue. Does anyone have any advice on what my next step should be before taking it in to be serviced?

This is what "More info" shows under "disk burning". There was no listing of "s-drive".

SONY DVD RW DW-U10A:

Firmware Revision: A43h
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipped/Supported)
Cache: 8192 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -RW, +R, +RW
Burn Underrun Protection CD: Yes
Burn Underrun Protection DVD: Yes
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO
Media: No

1. Try playing a commercial dvd. Does it play exactly as expected under apple's dvd player app? If so ....

Titanic and _The King of Queens_ get rejected multiple times. They don't show up at all on the screen, and there is no error message. TurboTax loads quickly without a hitch.

2. Run apple's software updater if you haven't already and post which updates are recommended without installing them just yet. Let us take a look at the recommended updates prior to installation.

Here is the list. I have not downloaded any of the recommended updates because I was in the middle of working on the project that was being burned when this situation arose.

GarageBand Update 4.1.1
Keynote Update 4.0.2
Pages Update 3.0.2
Numbers Update 1.0.2
iWeb Update 2.0.3
Quicktime 7.5
iLife Support 8.3
Digital Camera Raw Compatibility 2.1
Safari 3.1.2
Security Update 2008-005 1.0

If your S-Drive or Burner is able to write to Dvd-R media but unable to read it then I suggest trying a quality dvd lens cleaner kit prior to calling apple's tech support.

Do you have a brand that you would recommend? Thank you for all your help.

I will report back with what I find out. Thanks again!