My friend has just come back from holiday where he took his Sony DVD-92E DVD camcorder to record some footage.
The problem is that one of the Memorex DVD-RW discs he used to record footage cannot be accessed by his new Dell laptop DVD reader or his standalone DVD player. He gave me the disc to try, and I cannot access it in either my laptop DVD reader or my external Philips Dual Layer DVD-RW drive.
Windows XP which we both run, just shows the normal empty drive icon in 'My Computer'
The disc however, plays back and is readable fine on his camera.
Also, the disc has been Finalized.
Now there is some debate whether this camera has either a useable Firewire port or USB port to drag data off the disc when it is in the camera's drive.
Most people think that the cameras 'hidden' sockets are only used as Sony service sockets and are not for public use.
So my question (finally)
Is there any software or hardware solution availble to read this disc?
Has anyone heard of this problem before, and what actually has gone wrong?
Next time, use a -R disc, instead of an -RW disc.
RW disc are unstable, and a lot of drives can't read them. You can see if there's a firmware upgrade for your computer drive, that may add that functionality to it.
Also send emails to the manufacturers of the different drives, and see if they have an answer........
Good luck!
If your camcorder can write and read the disc, there appears to be nothing wrong with it. However, rewritable media have lower levels of reflectivity than DVD-R discs have. The Sony may have written the disc so that the difference in reflectivity is enough for it to work but not enough for other drives to read the disc. You will probably have better luck with DVD-R discs than with DVD-RW.
The other issues are those of finalization and the VR format, both issues which make the trouble shooting complex. The fact that the disc records and plays on the Sony indicates that the Sony and the disc are not at fault, but there is something else that prevents the disc from being read. You might try finalizing the disc a second time--unfinalize it first. The other method is to try to capture the video from the camcorder through a FireWire or USB 2.0 connection. Since the Sony plays it, the files should transfer.
