Compatibility
Many DVD players do not support any UDF revision other than version 1.02. Discs created with a newer revision may still work in these players if the ISO 9660 bridge format is used. As some popular DVD burning programs default to UDF version 1.5 when burning video DVDs, users have found it necessary to avoid using the software wizard and instead manually configure the burn to version 1.02. Even if an operating system claims to be able to read UDF 1.50, it still may only support the plain build and not necessarily either the VAT or Spared Universal Disk Format builds.
Mac OS X 10.4.5 claims to support Revision 1.50 (see man mount_udf), yet it can only mount disks of the plain build properly and provides no virtualization support at all. It cannot mount UDF disks with VAT, as seen with the Sony Mavica issue. Releases before 10.4.11 mount disks with Sparing Table but does not read its files correctly. Version 10.4.11 fixes this problem.
Similarly, Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) cannot read DVD-RW disks that use the Universal Disk Format (UDF) 2.00 defect management system. This problem occurs if the UDF defect management system creates a sparing table that spans more than one sector on the DVD-RW disk. Windows XP SP2 can recognize that a DVD is using UDF. but, Windows Explorer displays the contents of a DVD as an empty folder. A hotfix is available for this and is included in Service Pack 3.
Read more about this topic: Universal Disk Format