I burnt a movie from limewire onto a sony dvd+r disc and can't play it on my sony dvd player but I can play it on a cheap magnasonic dvd player. Cn anyone here tell me why and what to do to play it on my sony player?
There can be dozens of reasons why the disc won't play on the Sony. The fact that it plays on the Magnasonic rules out flaws in the files themselves as long as the file was recorded as a DVD video file. (Some DVD players can play VCD or variations of MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 that other players cannot recognize.) Rather than list all the possible and very boringly technical reasons why the disc may not play, there are two things you can try that might help: 1) record the file again but this time change the book type of the disc from DVD+R recordable to "DVD-ROM." This tells the player that the disc is a standard movie disc, not a recorded disc; and many players that stumble on recorded discs fall for the ruse. 2) try a different brand or try a DVD-R. There are many slight variations in groove geometry that can cause an optical pick-up head to be unable to follow a recorded signal, even if it is recorded correctly and recorded well.
This link to Lite-On K-Probe utility explains book typing: http://www.k-probe.com/bitsetting-booktype-faq.php If your drive is capable of "lying" about the type of disc (not all drives can, but NEC, Pioneer, and Lite-On generally are), either a utility from the drive manufacturer or using Nero, for example, will allow the drive to intentionally misidentify the disc as a DVD-ROM disc instead of a recordable disc. Older DVD players and some "anti-DVD+R/+RW" players may refuse to read recordable discs, to the misidentification works to fool the drive into playing a recorded DVD+R. Sony was part of the Sony/HP/Philips trio that broke from the DVD Forum to develop DVD+RW, but since they source many players from multiple sources, some players may not work as well with DVD+R discs as one would expect.
