Recorded DVD not recognized in drive

Is it able to run in other Intel Macs running Tiger?

Something similar to this happened to my MB recently. When I put any CD/DVD including a commercial DVD movie, it first showed up as blank and then about a minute later, was kicked out of the drive. Went in to see the Mac Genius and they replaced the drive on an overnight operation. I only had about a month to go on my warranty and this convinced me to sign up for an additional 2 years of AppleCare for around $170 or so.

Either the preferences for the file system reading got corrupted somehow, or your optical drive is damaged.

One way to test it is boot off an erase and installed external hard drive and see if you have trouble reading the disc. If you do, you know you have a hardware problem.

Go out and buy an external hard drive known to boot that kind of Mac.
Run the operating system installer that came with the machine and install on that hard drive after formatting it GUID with Disk Utility's Partition section.
After installing the operating system on that drive, select it from Apple menu -> System Preferences -> Startup Disc and click on restart.

Insert the dodgy DVD+RW.

If it fails to work, you know the optical drive is the one that won't play those kinds of discs, or it is damaged.

Why not just do a simple visit with an Apple Genius? Doesn't cost anything and if the optical drive is bad AND you still covered under the warranty, they will replace it for free. That's what happened to me.

I have the same problem but I fixed it by installing a free program called Refit. There's more info about how to use it in one of my guides (it's about how to install Windows 7 on your Macbook but it shows you how to get Refit too). Hope it helps.

http://macbrainiac.blogspot.com/2009/01/picture-guide-install-windows-7-on.html