My father-in-law has recorded my son's sports day & other things onto dvd from his dvd machine not computer & we have tried playing it back on our desktop & laptop dvd players without sucess

The dvd says

Panasonic dvd RAM RAM47
DVD-RAM 120 min/4.7GB
rewritable
2~3xspeed

Any ideas, we can play normal dvd's & picture cd's

Thanks Amanda

It's a dvd RAM disc so that might be the reason why you cannot play it back. It is a different type of disc compared to your regular dvd-r or dvd+r (or their re-writable versions) and as you can see it doesn't want to play back on either of your computers.

This could be due to the dvd drives not being able to read and then playback RAM discs, you may be able to purchase a new dvd drive that can play back RAM discs, do a search on Google or eBay for one. If you do find one make sure playing back RAM discs is listed in the spec.

Other than that, you will have to connect the dvd player up to the computer, play back the RAM disc and copy it onto the computer hard drive for editing. Just use regular dvd discs in future and you won't have this problem again. RAM discs are not as popular as the other discs listed here.

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Thank you for your help

Amanda