[hadocon]

Both can burn DVDs, but of course Apple advertises the Superdrive as being able to burn DVDs that will play in a regular DVD player. I get the feeling that a Superdrive is the same as a combo drive, but with the Superdrive Apple supplies DVD authoring software. If I had a combo drive and I used Compressor or another tool to create DVD content (ie, muxed MPEG2 and WAV), could I burn this to a DVD using a combo drive and read it in a DVD player, or am I missing something?

[bleuvixen]

a combo drive only burns CDs, but will also read DVDs, it will not burn them.

[Commodus]

Combo drives and Superdrives are significantly different. You'll often see Combo drives referred to as DVD/CD-RW drives in the Windows world; that's to tell you that it can only read one format, but can read and write the other. Superdrives are usually DVD-R or DVD-RW drives in conventional terminology.

And just so you know: there is literally no way to get a Combo drive to burn DVDs, because the hardware itself is technically incapable of it.

[hadocon]

Thanx for the help. I knew my reasoning was off somewhere...

[SSharon]

just to point out though that apple does say the superdrive is dvd-r while apple system profiler says dvd-rw (at least on my DP MDD)