How To Burn A Playable DVD-Video Disc

You can use Finder, Disk Utility, iTunes, iPhoto, or iDVD to burn files into writable CD or DVD. Apple Support has a summary guide on how to go about burning a CD or DVD. If you want to burn a disc image file (commonly in ISO disc format and with an ISO extension), a separate Apple Support article describes how you can burn a disk image file on a CD or DVD in Mac OS X.

However, if you have DVD Video files in VIDEO_TS folder, there is no quick method using the bundled apps in Mac OS X to burn a DVD-Video disc to be playable in regular DVD players.

Burn is an open source and free app that can help you burn the disc to the correct DVD Video format.

Or if you prefer the command line using Terminal, the steps are:

• Create a new folder to house your VIDEO_TS folder, for example ~/Downloads/XMas2008/VIDEO_TS.

• On a Terminal session, enter the following command:

  hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name MY_DVD_NAME -o MY_DVD.iso /path/to/folder/containing/VIDEO_TS

  Using the above example:

  hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name XMas2008 -o XMas2008.iso ~/Downloads/Xmas2008/

• Make sure that /path/to/folder/containing/VIDEO_TS is the path to the folder containing the VIDEO_TS folder, not the VIDEO_TS folder itself.

• The command will create an ISO disk image file XMas2008.iso.

• Start Disk Utility, drag the newly created XMas2008.iso into Disk Utility and click the Burn button to create the DVD-Video disc.