had the same problem and was stumped until an engineer told me that if you burn a dvd on a pc/laptop to play in your machine (in living room etc) it'll play ok but if you then erase the disc and then try and use it to record a tv show etc it won't work as the laser in it burns differently from a pc and it has scanned the disc and decided that the disc isn't blank (technically true). as for new discs it'll accept any speed dvd-r but only 4x speed dvd-rw's !!??.
hope this helps.
scooby.71, August 2009
