A customer has contacted me to say that a DVD I supplied won't play on her MacBook. It plays on her husband's Linux laptop and on a DVD player, so I don't think it's a faulty disc. I seem to remember a similar problem a few years ago with a DVD which would play on anything except a Mac, but can't find any details for that just now. The disc is a replicated one (not burnt on a DVD drive), single layer, PAL and quite a few people have had copies without reporting any playback problems.

Any suggestions regarding the cause of the problem would be very welcome.

Usually a firmware issue with the drive. I am not a Mac user but I am sure there must be updates for the Mac hardware to update the firmware for the drive.

Ron Evans

Many thanks for your suggestion and apologies for the long delay in responding. The customer has come back to me and said it's an "iMac (running Mountain Lion) and they are App version 5500.38.2 and Framework version 5.7.1 I believe they are the latest versions - I've had no prompt to upgrade them."

Any other comments/suggestions?

Thanks again

Paul

Any chance that their Macbook just needs a lens cleaning on their disc drive?

What does the Mac do? Spit it out after a minute or so of trying? No messages? Other DVDs play fine?

Maybe re burn the disc on a different type of media at a slower speed?

Thanks for the suggestion John. I don't think it's a lens cleaning issue because he says other discs play OK. I think the discs (it's a two DVD set) are simply rejected.

I can't reburn on different media because this is a replicated disc not a burnt one. I should add that hundreds of copies have been out for a while without any problems, then suddenly in a short space of time I get two owners of new Macs saying they can't play any of my DVDs.

It must be some sort of compatability issue, but I've no idea what.

Any other comments/suggestions are very welcome.

Paul

It could possibly be a codec issue. Try installing Perian and maybe VLC to see if their codec packages can help.

Thanks for the suggestion John. I don't think it's a lens cleaning issue because he says other discs play OK. I think the discs (it's a two DVD set) are simply rejected.

I can't reburn on different media because this is a replicated disc not a burnt one. I should add that hundreds of copies have been out for a while without any problems, then suddenly in a short space of time I get two owners of new Macs saying they can't play any of my DVDs.

It must be some sort of compatability issue, but I've no idea what.

Any other comments/suggestions are very welcome.

Paul

Any regional coding or copy protection on that disc?

Many thanks for the further comments. There's no copy protection or region coding on the discs so that can't be the problem. The codec issue is certainly a possibility and I'll suggest that to them.

Thanks again

Paul