How do I burn a DVD or CDROM in Mac OS X?

I have a folder full of important files that I want to share with my Dad, but it’s too much to email and I don’t want him to have to figure out something like dropbox. Instead, I want to use the old fashioned approach of creating a CDROM on my new MacBook. But there’s no “burning” app so how do I proceed?

If you’re used to launching a program (like Roxio’s Toast app) to burn a disk it’s possible you haven’t been exploring the new features in the latest generation of Mac OS X system, because these abilities are built-in to the operating system now.

This isn’t to say that you can turn that video into a DVD with menus and a nice template design all within the OS, but if you just want to burn a DVD or burn a CDROM (or a music CD, for that matter), then it’s surprisingly easy to accomplish what you seek.

The first step is to create a new folder and drop everything into it that you want on the disk. Pay attention to size as a CDROM maxes out at about 650MB and a DVD has a max capacity of about 4.5GB. Once you’ve set that up, click on the folder, then Control-click on the folder’s icon. You’ll see this:

Choose “Burn xxx to Disc…” (in this case the name “DVD Video Recording” is the name of the folder I created). You’ll then see:

Notice here that it tells you how big the data set is (2.17GB) to help you figure out if you can get away with a CD or need a DVD. If it’s bigger than you can fit on the disk, cancel out, prune your data, and try again.
Once you insert a blank disc – assuming you have a CD/DVD burner – then you’ll see this:

Give the disc a good name and remember that if you want it to be maximally cross-platform compatible with even older Windows systems that 8 characters, no spaces, is what you should aim for. Ready? Click on “Burn” and you’re burning your cdrom or dvdrom on your MacBook system…