Netpurgatory

Since I haven’t written anything in months I thought I would put something semi-informative here.

I’ve been slowly capturing all my family’s VHS home movies onto my computer and making (even slower then the capturing) DVDs. My main goal right now is just to get everything digital since the VHS aren’t exactly going to improve as they age (and some of them already look kind of bad). I may describe how I capture later but right now I want to talk about burning DVDs a little.

I make the DVDs on my Mac (a G4 powerbook running Leopard). I was trying to burn DVDs of three tapes before last weekend and ran into some very annoying trouble. I used iMovie and iDVD to make menus and all that and then made a disk image with iDVD. Then I tried to burn the dmg file using Disk Utility.app (the standard Apple thing).

The disk got through the burning fine but then would fail in the verify step every time. This lead to a pile of discarded DVDs before I looked into it closer. Disk Utility.app gave no useful info so I checked the log file it pointed it. And for each failed verify there was an error

0x80020063

Oddly, these failing DVDs all played just fine in a DVD player or a computer. Thanks to the error code this seemed like something I could google pretty easily. But I was wrong. Some people claimed it was due to bad media. Others claimed you need to repair disk permissions. A few said it was because of corrupted plist files (but they wouldn’t say which one). Made me really miss how useful the gentoo forums were where people actually know things and will share info.

In the end I tried the permissions and plist things with no luck. Finally, I tried burning a different brand of DVD and amazingly, it would verify fine. I’m not sure why the FujiFilm DVD-R fail at the verify step while the other disks worked. It could be related to the brand. Or it could be related to the -R and +R difference. I don’t have enough different disks to figure that out.

It seems to me that the verification error 0x80020063 is pretty much worthless since disks can fail that and still work fine. I’m not thrilled with this conclusion, but for now it’s all I’ve got.