Burned DVD's won't play on a regular DVD player

Could be an old DVD player issue. How old is your DVD player? Have you tried the disk in a newer DVD player?

It also could be a media quality issue. I had similar issues several years ago when I tried using some cheap DVD-Rs that I picked up at somewhere like Best Buy. After talking with the folks at my local Apple Store, I bought some Apple-branded DVDs (which, I believe, they no longer make) and they worked just fine, even on a moderately old DVD player. I haven't burned a DVD lately, though, so I'm not sure what a good brand currently is.

Did you use the Finder, or iDVD, to burn your DVD?

If you used the Finder to burn a movie file to DVD, then you created a data DVD, not a playable DVD. Creating a disk image of the file & burning to DVD does the same thing, it creates a data DVD.

In order to burn a DVD that is playable on a DVD player, you need to use +iDVD, Toast or similar authoring app+ to create & burn your DVD.

What make/model camcorder are you using? Did you capture/import the video into iMovie, Final Cut or similar editing app?

Verbatim is a good brand of DVD. ( http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm)

I burned a DVD of the movie...

I assumed you used iDVD or some other DVD burning software like Toast. If you just used the Finder it won't be formatted correctly. If using a program like Toast and you have a choice of using different burn speeds burning at the lowest speed possible produces the most reliable DVDs.

How did you burn it? It is important to recognize that set-top DVD players require that videos be converted to specific resolution, format, and adhere to a specific file structure and naming convention. For this reason, you need tools like iDVD (comes with your Mac), Toast, DVD Studio, or Encore. When people usually have this problem, it's because they simply burned a data DVD with some movie files on it, not knowing that DVD players won't recognize the disk

If you didn't use iDVD, try using that to create the DVD first.

If you were using a video DVD authoring program, and it didn't work, there are a few possibilities: the DVD player you tried doesn't support playback of recordable media (all recent models do, but players that came out before recordable DVDs were common often didn't); the DVD-recordable media itself is problematic (some brands perform poorly in regular DVD players); or the video encode failed (rare, generally happens as the result of a software glitch somewhere down the line).

The El Gato device will save the video as an MPEG-4 file. If you burn this straight to DVD, the video will be viewable on computers with MPEG-4 codecs and DVD players that can playback MPEG-4.

The result will not be a video DVD that you would expect to play on most players. Further, DVD players with MPEG-4 playback capabilities are often picky about the specific MPEG-4 profiles, bitrates, and resolutions that it will support.

If you want a DVD that's universally playable in DVD video players, you need to create a DVD video disc using an authoring tool. iDVD, DVD Studio, Encore, Toast, etc. You don't need iMovie as iDVD will transcode the video to MPEG-2 for you.

MatMDDC,

Did you use DVD+R. Some of the older DVD players only supported -R media.

Exactly which Elgato device do you have? Specific model.

I just had this problem on a DVD I purchased, what I did was to drag the VIDEO_TS folder from the Finder to the DVD Application icon I had in the Dock, and it worked fine. This may help you.

Same problem only in reverse...my burned DVD won't play on my Mac.