If you take away one thing from the article it is this; try different readers. Some readers perform far better than others. I have one 'magic' DVD reader that will overcome damage that makes most other drives choke with errors, and the result is usually a flawless rip.

AVSForum, Doom9, Redump and Hydrogenaudio are all good places to find out about these drives, too.

Yeah, an old iMac is the one that reads most them.

But I was hoping for something better.

> MacOS does not recognise the disk when inserted (oddly enough, much older CDs still are).

Difference in data density? A cd stores ~800mb, a DVD ~4700mb.

Could be, but I’m also betting on media quality. First recordable CDs were expensive. Those last DVDs I bough were dirt cheap

CD stores 650MB in standard format. 800MB is overburn.