DVD-R disc - contents not recognized

I have several DVD discs that were recorded on a standalone DVD recorder and finalized. The content of these discs is non-commercial: home movies transferred from a Mini-DV camcorder. Windows 10 shows the discs as being blank. When viewed in Disc Management, it shows the file systems for these discs as RAW. It does not show me the Audio_TS and Video_TS folders. These are not re-writable discs, and only one session was recorded to each disc. I have tried these discs on two different Windows 10 machines with different DVD drives - same result. I just did a clean install of Windows 10 (swapped out the hard drive) - again no access to disc contents in Windows Explorer. Yes, I have selected "show hidden files". I also checked the registry for the upper and lower filters that prevented some machines from seeing their optical discs drives.

Additional info:

The same systems do recognize a commercially pressed DVD and shows me the contents (VOB files etc.)

I tried said discs in a Windows Vista machine and was able to see the contents.

I can see the disc name and access the contents on a 2009 MacBook Pro running El Capitan.

I can view the videos on said discs in VLC and Power DVD on these PCs (the Windows 10 machines).

I cannot access the content of the discs using the appropriate Import media settings in both Premiere Elements 11 and Sony Vegas Pro 10.

Any ideas?

mike s said:

Of course, you answered what would be my first question (are they finalized?) in your post. Your other info suggests that you know the drill, and have excluded some of the usual reasons. I suspect that your DVD recorder is producing discs that break the rules for either the Windows 10 file system drivers or your Win10 machine's DVD drive firmware, or both, in a subtle way.

I assume you are trying to import the video to your editing software.

What about trying alternate means of getting the files off the disc (ISObuster for generic optical media recovery; DVD ripping software like DVDFab, AnyDVD HD, etc). Or connect an external USB DVD drive, preferably another brand from your internal, and see if it will read the discs.

I have an ancient Panasonic standalone DVD video recorder which once produced discs that my PC could not read just as you describe. In the end I discovered that there was a formatting issue (after finalization it was writing bad blocks at the end of the disc, which fooled the PC into thinking it was unformatted). This was ultimately solved with a firmware update for the recorder. In the meantime, I used DVDFab (which bypasses CDFS rules because it must deal with copy protection schemes) to extract the contents of the disc and it allowed me to do what I wanted to.

I have tried the same discs on a second machine with Windows 10 - it was not able to read them.

Much of my experimentation has been on a Dell Optiplex 9010 with WIndows 10 Pro installed. I swapped out the hard drive and did a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro from the Dell Install disc. It recognized the DVDs in question.

I will give DVDFab a try and report back.

I also contacted MIcrosoft, and their support agent was stumped too.