It can't even read the DVD-R's it writes itself, though they play perfectly
well on my 3 year old laptop
Maybe I'm way off base here, but I fought almost exactly this battle with an external Sony DVD recorder on a Mac. Are you by any chance on a Mac and using DVD+R media instead of DVD-R? My Sony would burn and verify +R disks just fine (using Toast) but it wouldn't read them at all in the finder. The built-in DVD reader would mount and partially read the disk but there were always loads of errors. Meanwhile, the same writer and disks work perfectly for Retrospect backups. In fact Retrospect recommends +R disks for most efficient backups with this drive/OS combo so I just assumed this was fine for disks used in the Finder as well. The problem is +R media and Mac OS-X. Supposedly Panther is more cross media friendly but Jaguar isn't. It wants -R media only. There was nothing wrong the the +R disks I was burning in Toast. I can read them fine on a Windows system. Windows is more +R friendly. Maybe you really do have a bum drive, but your story sounds so familiar that I had to post this as an idea. If you're on Windows you may be experiencing just the opposite as DVD+R is more or less the default on that platform and DVD-R is not supported quite as well.
Bob Smith
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