TV and Photos in Windows Vista - CD and DVD Drives
(Page 6 of 7 )
The first CD burner I ever saw was the size of a small microwave oven. It took 68 minutes to fill a 68-minute CD, and it produced more coasters than Six Flags. Suffice it to say, things have improved, although after a few minutes of trying to burn a disc in Vista, you’d be hard pressed to tell.
I’ll just come out and say it: the CD/DVD burning feature built into Windows Vista just doesn’t work. Sure, I’ll get some bafflingly defensive emails from a handful of readers, but if you can show me a CD-R with readable data created by Windows Vista, I’ll eat my hat.
In theory, it goes like this:
Open Windows Explorer.
- Place a blank disc in your burner, and close the drawer.
Highlight your CD/DVD drive in the tree, and the Burn a Disc window appears. Click Show formatting options to show the expanded window in Figure 4-20.
Figure 4-20. Open this window each and every time you make a CD in Vista, or the disc you make may not be readable
Select the Mastered option and click Next to make the Burn a Disc window go away.
Unless you’re absolutely certain you’re only going to be using this disc on Vista PCs, don’t ever use the Live File System. Despite Microsoft’s overly optimistic language here, discs formatted with the “Live” filesystem (also known as UDF) won’t be readable on older PCs, Macs, or just about anything else. And if you skip steps 3 and 4 here, and instead just start dragging files onto your disc, Windows will use the Live File System without asking. (Naturally, there’s no way to change the default.)
Drag some files or folders onto your CD/DVD drive.
When you’re done dragging files, click the Burn to disc button (or right-click the CD/DVD drive and select Burn to disc), and then follow the prompts.
At this point, Windows Explorer will crash. Or, maybe you’ll get lucky, and nothing at all will happen (no CD, no messages, nothing).
If this is happening to you, do yourself a favor and skip the part where you try to diagnose the problem. Instead, just use any other CD/DVD burning software to make your discs, and you’ll never look back:
You can burn ordinary data CDs and data DVDs with Express Burn, available for free from http://www.nch.com.au/. If you want more pizzazz, try a commercial solution, such as Roxio Easy Media Creator (http:// www.roxio.com/), Ashampoo Burning Studio (http://www.ashampoo. com/), or Nero (http://www.nero.com/).
You can make audio CDs right in Windows Media Player, as well as Apple iTunes, by creating a custom playlist, and then burning the playlist to a disc.
You can make DVD movies from your TV recordings from within Windows Media Center.
To burn discs from ISO image files, as well as create ISO files from discs, use ISO Recorder (free; http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com).
With the proper disc burning software, now all that can go wrong is everything else.
Next: Troubleshoot CD and DVD Playback Problems >>
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 This article is excerpted from chapter four of the book Windows Vista Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Hacks for the Cranky Consumer, written by David A. Karp (O'Reilly, 2008; ISBN: 0596527624). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
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