I had a VIDEO_TS folder with VOB files that I wanted to burn to a DVD in order to be able to play it on our DVD player.

The first step was to create an ISO image. This can be done with a tool that comes with MacOS. Open a terminal and enter the following:

hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name "<volume name>" -o /target/image.iso \
    /path/to/parent/folder/

Make sure you specify the folder that contains the VIDEO_TS folder as the source folder in the above command line. Parallel to the VIDEO_TS folder you should also have an (empty) AUDIO_TS folder. Also make sure that there is no .DS_Store file (remove from terminal if present.) And note that the above is one logical line (the \ is a line break).

So, how do you write the ISO file to a DVD?

I tried to do this from Disk Utility, but didn’t quite succeed: Disk Utility wrote the image, but at the end it ejected the disk and showed an error message (“The device failed to respond properly.”) I could not play this DVD in my DVD player. However, I could play it on the Mac. Maybe it wasn’t properly “finalized” (dunno whether this is still needed for UDF disks?!)…

So I downloaded the free (and open source!) Burn tool. And this time I was more successful — or at least it seemed so, since the DVD was properly written without any error message. However, the DVD did not play properly on our stand-alone DVD player. It recognized the DISK as an MP3 disk!? Maybe the ISO image was not ok?!

In a next try I downloaded DVD Imager and created an ISO image with it. Afterwards I burnt it to DVD using Disk Utility. Again, our DVD player couldn’t play the disk. 🙁

Why, oh why is it so hard to do what takes me only a couple of clicks under Windoze, using Nero?!

Hints, anyone?!