How to burn a DVD on my iMac???

Hi Jen~!

Welcome to the forums! whoo hoo

What kind of dvd are you trying to make? are you trying to make a dvd to play in like a tv DVD player? Or maybe you just want to put some files on a disk, so another computer can read those files.

+I'm under the impression all i have to do burn a DVD onto a disc is put the DVD in the computer, click burn to disc, then insert a blank disc & click burn.+

And, another question to clear things up:

Are you actually dragging some content/file/video/photos onto the blank DVD before trying to burn?

Is this a homemade video/movie?

If so, you cannot burn a movie directly from Finder because it has to be rendered (processed) to a format which will be readable/viewable with any DVD player. You will need to import your movie into iMovie, or one of the other iLife apps and process/burn from there.

Or did you download it from somewhere? If that is the case, post back. Depending on where/how you got it, you may not be able to because of copyright issues.

Well, the dance concert is a video, correct? Whether it's a dance concert or movie, it is still a video file and you won't be able to copy that using Finder. You will need to "import" it first and then run through other software to make it recordable/playable. There are a couple of options depending on the format that video is in:

1. Try to import it into iMovie. If that doesn't work,

2. Download MPEG Streamclip (free) and convert the video into a format iMovie can work with. With some formats, it needs to have the MPEG2 Component installed (from Apple as a download for about $20); MPEG Streamclip is here:

http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html

After you have the footage converted, import into iMovie or iDVD to edit (or not), add a theme (or not) and burn from there. That process will produce a video DVD playable on any DVD player (or computer).

3. Buy Roxio Toast ($$); it has a feature to burn a copy of a CD or DVD (as long as the content is unprotected).

Actually, if you want to copy one DVD to another, I believe this is your best solution (assuming you don't have Toast, which has a Disk Copy function). This process will create an exact copy of the disk in the form of a disk image, which you can then burn as a new DVD.

1) Insert the original DVD. Open Disk Utility, which you will find in your Applications/Utilities folder.
2) In Disk Utility, look at the left-hand panel. You'll see the DVD listed there - probably with two lines (the top one is the model of the drive itself, and the lower one is the name of the disk). Click on the lower line.
3) Go to the FIle menu. Choose New - Disk Image from "(the name of your disk)". You'll see a new window come up. The line at the top will be the name of the disk (you can leave this as is). Make sure it's saved to your desktop. At the bottom, choose "DVD/CD master" as the image format, and Encryption should be "none". Click Save. This will take a few minutes and will result in a new image file on your desktop.
4) Eject the original DVD, and insert a blank one.
5) In Disk Utility, you should have the disk image that you created earlier listed in the bottom left panel. If it's not there, drag it in from the desktop. Highlight it, and click Burn in the top panel.

This will create a new DVD copy of your disk image. You can hold onto the image and create as many DVD copies as you need to. Note that you can't drag this image to a blank DVD in the Finder - you must use the Burn command in Disk Utility in order to correctly burn the image.

Matt

Thanks, I learned something - did not realize that making a .dmg from a DVD would result in a playable video.

Hi Matt,
I followed your directions and all went well, however about 70% thru the copy function, the process ended and an error message came up "Unable to complete copy function due to damaged disk"

I stopped the process, ejected the DVD, and reinserted and checked all the files which are all readable with no damage noted on any file. Any idea of why it won't copy the complete DVD?