Slight alarm bells ringing here.  It’s been a while since I last had to burn optical media for anything other than DVD-video mastering, so it’s not an issue I’m likely to have come across since the early days of Mac OS X “Leopard” (10.5.x).

This afternoon I happily burned a DVD using Apple Finder as usual, and it all went fine, verifying as usual. Since the target is a mixture of users on Windows and Mac OS X, I asked a Windows-using colleague to check the burned DVD worked on her machine.  Epic Fail.  Came up with the usual dialogue box asking how to open the contents, and Explorer showed the disc as having nothing in the root directory.

When I took the disc back and mounted it on the Mac, I checked in Disk Utility and sure enough, the mounted drive is in the native HFS+ format for Macs. Totally useless on PC’s.  I’m sure Mac OS X used to burn Hybrid media suitable for use on either Mac or PC, but this seems to have changed somewhere in the last few years.

Googling the problem online doesn’t bring up obvious answers, so I had to do a little more digging.  One possible solution was found here in the Apple discussion forums, which I’m now trying for myself.

Burn (Freeware utility) for Mac OS, on Sourceforge

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So – I’ve told it to create a disk image suitable for PC’s (as shown in the dropdown menu above), and I’ll mount it in the Finder before burning to DVD to see what format the image actually has:

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Good sign – the Finder sees ISO 9660 (Joliet).  Now I just need to burn the image to disk, which I’m doing from inside the Burn app rather than asking Disk Utility to burn an ISO.  I’ll test that later.

So while I wait for the disk to burn. I’ll add to these notes that I need to check the disc on a Windows box, to check that the file names remain intact.  For some uses this might not matter, but for the application I have in mind (sending multitrack audio projects to multiple users for training purposes), the file and directory names to remain intact for Reaper (or any other audio sequencer) to find them again without having have the user point it to them.

As I write this I also realise that the burning process, despite being set to run at 8x (the fastest the drive supports) and the data-set and transfer rate remain the same as in Disk Utility, seems to be taking about twice as long as Disk Utility.

The final result:

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Also looking promising – let’s test it on a Windows box and see what it looks like!

UPDATE:  Fail. Comes up as blank DVD in Windows.  

Looks like the only option left in the time available is to transfer the content via USB key and burn the disk on Windows.

Anyone else have any better solutions that don’t involve spending money or reverting to the command-line?