I Recorded a DVD...And Now It Won't Play!

"Why can't I play back what I recorded on my DVD?"

A customer recently came in to our studio with a DVD that he had burned on a home DVD recorder. It played fine at home, but when he took it to his son's house, the DVD refused to play at all. He brought it to us, asking if we could help him solve the mystery of the quirky DVD.

With a few questions, we were able to quickly diagnose the problem. All home DVD recorders save video to the DVD in "stages". The first stage is preparation, where the DVD recorder reads the disc, determines if it's compatible, and prepares it to accept video.

In the second stage, the video is compressed and recorded to the disc. At this point, when you're done recording, you can view the video you've recorded, and even add more video later.

The third step is known as "finalizing". This is the crucial step that our customer missed, and it's really the most important. "Finalizing" prepares your DVD for playback on virtually any commercial DVD player. If you don't perform this step, you will only be able to play back your DVD on the unit you recorded it on. This means that if you skip this step, and your DVD recorder stops working, your collection of DVDs will not play on any other unit.

This "finalizing" step is one that many of our customers miss. We're very concerned about what this means for all those valuable memories stored on DVDs in homes across the country. Eventually, those DVD recorders will fail; it's a mathematical certainty. When-not if-they do, those priceless DVDs will become expensive coasters if the "finalizing" step has not been performed.

It's also important to note that "finalizing" a DVD is only possible using the recorder that captured the video. You can't record on one unit and "finalize" on another (unless you're lucky enough to find the exact same unit somewhere else).

If you have a home DVD recorder, and you're not sure if you're using it properly, contact us. We can often help guide you through this complicated new world of technology.