[jreades]

I'm looking for recommendations/reviews of external DVD +/- RW burners... however I must confess that my understanding of some of the issues is a little patchy:

1. I believe that there are new dual-layer burners with capacities beyond 4.7GB (up to 6 or 7 GB?). Are these dual-layer discs compatible with a run-of-the-mill DVD player? Or would that be a case of spending a lot of $$$ for the latest and greatest that isn't actually particularly useful.

My primary purpose is backups and the odd iDVD slideshow (using very hi-res images from a film scanner) or movie so the additional capacity is useful, but only if it doesn't require special hardware and can be read on any DVD player.

2. Are there any drives that are known to be particularly good/bad or are particularly good to use with a Mac (i.e. Pioneer)? For instance, based on personal experience you'd never get me to buy a WesternDigital HD, but I'd jump at a Seagate in a second. I'd imagine that various manufacturers have a reputation in the field. Sony, Lacie, and Pioneer seem to be the most popular on the Mac forums from what I can gather.

3. Interface compatability would be a plus -- USB/FireWire ideally so that my girlfriend can use it with her a PC laptop too. Obviously USB2 would be more useful in the long run than USB1.x, but frankly I don't care all that much since I'll be using the FireWire interface.

4. Upgrade-able to region-free would be nice as well -- I live in the UK but used to be US-based and so have a nice mish-mash of Region 1 and 2 DVDs that I'd like to play from a single drive.

Thoughts?

TIA.

jon

[icruise]

I can't really help you with the specifics of your questions, but I will just point out that no external DVD burner will be usable with iDVD.

[zacharydz]

I bought an NEC ND-2500A DVD-+R/W burner for about $60. Works quite well on my iBook (800 MHz G4, OS 10.3.5)

All I had to do is use Patchburn II, which loaded all the drivers and now I can use all the iLife programs.

iDVD doesn't work out of the box with external DVD burners, but there is a very simple procedure to enable it (google search for it...forget the name of the webpage). Basically you add two small files into your Home directory, and then you have the option to burn to an external drive or make an image in iDVD. I applied that patch as well, and I have successfully used iDVD as well.


Apparently, there is also a patch for the NEC ND-2500A to make it support burning Dual-Layer DVDs and makes it region free (although you need a PC to apply the firmware patch). I havent tried that firmware patch, since I dont have any DL media.