[tramahound]

I have an old tibook 400 along with an oxford 911 equipped 5.25” firewire enclosure I’ve been using for a regular hard drive backup. Now I’m getting a new oxford 912 dual hdd enclosure to take care of back ups and would like to pop a dvd burner in the old single 5.25” enclosure. Is this something I could just get a run of the mill internal dvd-r/rw drive for? Like one of those $40 after rebate deals I always see even? What should I look for, or are there well regarded examples that most people stick with on the Mac? I’m probably going to be using it with toast and popcorn and whatnot. I’m guessing there’s still no way to use such a set up to burn from imovie or idvd huh? or, is this even feasable with what I have to work with?
Thanks

[Eug Wanker]

I would get a name brand DVD burner to stick in the Firewire enclosure. Some of the more esoteric burners don't always play nice with OS X. An older generation 4X or 8X name brand burner is fine.

You can use iDVD with external burners. In the very least you can make DVD images from iDVD that can be burned with Toast. You need to download a couple of files to expose an iDVD Easter Egg. Just do a Google search for the files.

This is my TiBook with iDVD 4. The UJ-815 is the built-in drive. The LF-D521 drive is a standard 5.25 DVD-RAM/-R/-RW drive in a cheap enclosure. Also note the option for DVD images.

[tramahound]

so would a regular DVD-R/RW drive be good? or is it worthwhile to get one of those universal jobs that can do + and - and all that jazz? how about those fancy new dual layer guys too? would my low spec system mean I couldn't use one of those? does my system have any effect on the drive's performance?
thanks for the reply and the graphic.

[wuzup101]

I personally have a sony 4x DVD+/-RW in a fairly cheap firewire/usb2.0 external enclosure. When I first got it I had to do a google search to find some software/files to enable it on OSX. For the life of me I can't figure out what the heck the files were. I would also advise getting a name brand burner... from what I hear panasonic and pioneer burners work well with OSX (i think I read it in the peripherals forum here).

As for system performance atleast in the PC sector it doesn't have that big of an affect on performance. I know the low end PCs that I have at my house can use a DVD burner without any problem. You don't need much horsepower to run one.

As for dual layer burners I don't know much about them and OSX. I know that LaCie makes a 16x Dual Layer external burner that you can buy right off the apple site. From what I've read you currently need to use a program like Toast to use dual layer b/c it's not natively built into OSX (Tiger is supposed to cover this). Also this burner that I speak of also requires a powermac g4 500mhz or higher... not sure if you would have the juice to run it... though it would probably work...

[tramahound]

thanks for all the information. I think I'll try to look into some Pioneer models since that's what Apple uses for the superdrives. that must mean something right? :/
dual layer burning would be nice, especially with Roxio Popcorn I bet...hopefully something like that would work with my lowly 400mhz G4 though.