[nJm]

We have a Panasonic DVD Recorder which uses DVD-RAM discs for re-writable media. I want to shift some home movies from VHS to my iMac and the easiest way for me would be to burn them onto DVD using the Panasonic recorder and then extract that video on the iMac and edit with iMovie. Is there any way I can get my mac to read the DVD-RAM discs. It just spits them out without saying anything if I put them in, although naturally any DVD-R discs I burn in the recorder work fine in the mac. I was hoping I could do this without going through a pile of DVD-Rs.

Any tips?

[ism]

I think you need an actual DVD-RAM reader. Lacie used to have one. Don't know if they do anymore.

[Spoffo]

Your drive may very well read RAM disks. (The Pioneer Drives in the G5 Towers do) but the Mac OS doesn't recognize the file format of RAMs. There is a little patch called Read!DVD that patches the OS to read them. You can get it online at <http://www.softarch.com/> It's a $40 download, but they promise to refund it if it doesn't work for you. I did a lot of experimenting with porting DVD files from a Panny stand-alone to my Mac about a year ago, and posted a long thread discussing what worked and what didn't over at the Mac forum on Videohelp.com

That said, I don't do it any more. I was mainly burning keeper copies of HD down-converts from HBO, and while I figured out methods that work using RAM disks, they were tedious, and there were a lot of irritating little problems with time code breaks and such. Now that DVD-R blanks are down to around 20 cents each, I just do a high-speed dub from the Panny's hard disk to a -R, copy that to my Mac for re-setting the widescreen flag and such and then burn a new disk. IMHO throwing away a 20 cent disk is easier than all the little hassles of working with RAM disks.

[Meritocracy]

I've been using Toast 7 for DVD-RAM's from my Panny recorder as Read DVD, if I recall correctly, hasn't been updated for Tiger.

[osxrules]

The reason the DVD-Ram discs didn't work in systems before 10.4 was because they are formatted in UDF v2 and ReadDVD added a driver. Tiger has added native support for UDF v2 so ReadDVD shouldn't be necessary. Unfortunately, it seems to have a bug whereby the file you need to copy from the disc shows up as a pipe (unix term) instead of a file so it doesn't copy.

I heard this may do the trick:

http://www.pixela-1.com/vrf_browser.htm

but I couldn't find a demo. For Mac OS X to be a video platform, I find lack of native support for these formats quite appalling. Some camcorders that record straight to DVD use these video formats I believe.