So I go to burn a DVD of a few video files for my roommate tonight. Pop in a blank DVD, set up a burn folder, click burn, and... nothing. Open up Disk Utility and it doesn't exactly read the disc. It shows the DVD as having zero bytes, and I can't do anything with it from the looks of it. I figure, hey, bad disc (they're a few years old now, and some of my older burned DVDs are showing signs of disc rot, so this wasn't too surprising). I tried 4-5 other discs and no joy. So I figure, hey, maybe Apple released an update in the last few months that somehow mucked something up on my iMac, so I moved to my MacBook and got the same sort of situation.
I tell one of my roommates to try it on his XP-based machine and lo and behold... same issue. Different drive, different computer, different OS, and the same sort of error- that it could read the presence of a DVD but couldn't actually do anything with it. So he digs into his stash of DVDs, tries a couple, no use. I try a couple of his, no use.
The blank DVDs are stored in different rooms of our appartment and they both happen to experience these problems at the same time. I suspect some sort of mutant termite that feeds off of only the information strip on blank DVDs. Either that, or our building's getting nuked by radiation that only (hopefully!) impacts blank DVDs. Or, the ever-so-popular government conspiracy- maybe the NSA sneaks into our rooms at night and moves our blank media around for a laugh at our expense. Or maybe it's the Sony/HDDVD Consortium trying to force an upgrade to the lame next-gen media. Or, I guess it could just be an improbable set of bad discs, but that's not nearly as fun.
So what's the cleverest explanation for this?