Cynthia and mmalves,
Thanks for all your feedback and efforts. I see that it is probably the "crappy media." I've been trying so many things over the last couple days to solve this and I did read the comments and guides about burning and I do remember seeing Verbatium mentioned repeatedly. Actually, I don't even see a brand name on my DL DVDs and must admit I didn't even purchase them. They were given to me by a client years ago that wanted another project (lots of document scanned to PDFs). I think I burned only two (of 15) DVDs from this batch at that time and haven't touched them since, however they did work.
I come from computing back in the S100 Bus/CPM days when Verbatium media was frequently the only media available. I remember that I purchased hundreds of 8.5 inch Verbatium Floppy disks (do you remember those?).
I was perplexed as to why I hadn't had a problem with this Samsung drive up until this point, but was aware that the only thing that had changed was that I was burning DL for the first time in years.
I had sort of come to mmalves conclusion, but the hard way. Yesterday, I ripped a standard 4.7 video DVD and burned it on a standard DVD with no problems. Next I did a large backup of files (about 7GB) from my computer to one of these crappy DVDs, and it worked. Next I went to a neighbor that runs a MAC with HDTV (I don't even own a standalone DVD player currently) and asked him to rip one of his BluRay disks, which I than tried to burn DL (thinking that possibly something was wrong with the avi files I'd created), but it also didn't burn correctly.
So while I do believe my problem is crappy DVDs, I am still confused as to why using these same DVDs I was able to successfully burn a bunch of data files, and then a few minutes later not be able to burn (what I fully believe was a successful rip) a video disk. Is there something different (more demanding) about a video disk versus a data disk?
I will get some Verbatiums within the coming days and try again. I'm also going to get out my magnifying glass and see if I can find a name anywhere on these DL disks; they appear to not have a name anywhere. Thank you.
--tim