Is there no way to get MP3 discs burned onto DVR-R's (or RW's or any other DVD format) to work in the factory audio headunit?

6 DVD-R's would hold pretty much ALL of my iPod tracks and eliminate the need to rig up a USA Spec adapter - with the Canadian non-XM headunit it seems I am stuck with the CD changer interface solution for the ipod with the 6 "honda" playlists....

 

There was some discussion on this, and not sure if it was ever resolved. One idea might be to look on the TL boards, because there are a lot more people that were interested in doing this, and there might be a solution. Granted the ELS head units are different than the Bose head units (Panasonic vs Alpine) but there were a lot more heads working the problem.

 

From the TL boards I found some DVD-audio authoring software which lets you take MP3 files and create a DVD-audio iso image that Nero, etc can then burn with just a regular DVD-R.

However, this gives a max of approx 99 tracks per single-layer DVD-R, and while the DVD-A format is going to be cleaner than an MP3 CD-R, I'm not sure the extra time it takes to run the MP3 files thru the DVD-audio authoring process (converts them to WAVs and then creates the file structure for the iso image) and burn the image is worth it since I get nearly the same number of MP3 files on a single CD-R. Not to mention the DVD-audio disc image I burned lost all of the MP3 tags so no track titles, etc.

I was hoping to find a way to put 4+gigs of MP3's onto a single DVD disc the RL system can read.

 

If your source is an MP3 then manipulating it to any other format will never improve the quality of the audio. Rule #1- Subsequent generations cannot get better than the original.
The head unit will only recognise one DVD format - that is DVD-A. The head unit also has a DTS decoder so the best quality will be DVD-A 96kHz, 24bits wide, DTS encoded, 5.1 discreet channels. If you take an MP3 and make a DVD-A then you have a very good reproduction of some crappy quality audio.
Your point of using a DVD-R as a larger database for MP3's is a valid quest but the head unit will not playback that format. The best that you can probably do is burn each CD to a folder and then drag up to 6 folders to a single CD-R. The folders show up on the display, you can select any folder, the file info (or song titles) will be displayed or you can select random to playback up to 99 songs from up to 6 folders per CD. If you do this for all 6 slots, you will have a total of 36 folders available in the multi-disc changer. You are going to need to pee before you have listened to all 36 CD's and at that time you can swap discs! Good Luck.

 

This is what I've been doing and it works well, the next best thing IMO is the USAspec to put the iPod in the car.