[grovberg]

I need to add DVD burning to a MDD G4 that was bought with a Combo Drive. What current internal drives are supported by iDVD? I've looked around Apple's support site, but they just keep saying you need a SuperDrive, which isn't very helpful.

-Grover

[sworthy]

Though most Pioneers will definitely work, iDVD5 allows you to save as a disk image, so any third party dvd burner should work.

[brother337]

I've heard that most Pioneers will work as well. And possibly Panasonics too (at least with Apple's laptops.)

I installed a Pioneer drive into my iBook and it showed up in the system profiler as "Apple Supported/Shipped". Works with all the iApps too without Patchburn.

[drive-thru]

My Quicksilver has an NEC ND-2500A DVD-RW (8x) installed. Using the latest drivers it is seen as a supported Superdrive.

Have a look at http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ - there are lots of posts in the database>drive compatability section about how people got their drives to work. You can search that section for specific models/manufacturers - that's how I found the drivers for my NEC.

There is also an app called Patchburn which I am told will make most drives work with the iApps. I've never used it because my drive worked with the drivers.

[grovberg]

Thanks for all the input guys. We actually found that OWC sells official Apple Superdrives for extremely reasonable prices, so we just went with that.

As for PatchBurn, while I'm fine with using that kind of thing on my own machines, I used a patch once to enable a Samsung CD burner in our labs, and when we upgraded to 10.3, it stopped working. We waited for a month or so before the patch was updated and that was bad to say the least, so I'm not inclined to go that route again in the labs.

Thanks again everyone.

[mrbass]

I hooked up two lite-on dvd burners in a bytecc firewire enclosure (oxford chipset). LW-401S 4X and 1633-S 16X and with patchburn both can burn directly from iDVD 05.