CD Question

Why don't the CD's I burn play on any DVD players? They play on every CD player I have and I've even burned them at the slowest speed to see if it would make a difference, but no go.

Good question! I found I couldn't play my mac-burned CD on my parents' dvd player. I was quite disappointed. I can only guess that the wavelength of the DVD laser (I believe they are blue) doesn't 'see' the writable cds very well (cd lasers are red). However, this is only a guess... Anyone with more than idle speculation? Charlie.

I did a bit of hunting about this whole "My cd-r won't work on my dvd player", and I found this: The short version is, if your player doesn't explicitly claim to play cd-r or cd-rw, it probably won't. Charlie. <<snip>> Actually, the problem most likely is that your DVD plays VCD fine, it just doesn't play VCD burned to CD-R media. Go to and look up your DVD player on the DVD player compatibility list and see what it says. CD-R media is very different from commercial VCD, DVD or audio CDs and players that support them typically require a 2nd laser beam designed just to play CD-R media. If you can't find your DVD player on this list and your manual doesn't say anything about CD-R support, then it won't play CD-R. You could try burning to CD-RW media. In a few cases some people have gotten lucky and found that CD-RW would work where CD-R didn't, but most of the time if it won't play CD-R, it won't play CD-RW either. I'm not trying to be rude, but if you buy a DVD player in the future, make sure it supports CD-R. As long as people keep buying players that don't support CD-R, some companies will never support it. It's only if their sales drop because they don't support it that they'll finally start adding support for it. -- Jason (), January 31, 2002. <<snip>>