[Kelvin]

I'm thinking of getting a Mac but I'm not sure I want a Superdrive since it only supports DVD-R. This will be my first Mac, if purchased, and my first experience with burning any type of media, CD or DVD. It seems a lot of PC DVD burners are DVD+R drives so a Superdrive wouln't be able to read those DVDs correct?

I was thinking of getting a Mac without a Superdrive and then later purchase an external DVD-R/DVD+R DVD FW burner and use Toast Titanium 6 to author a DVD from iMove or FCE since my understanding is that iDVD doesn't support external DVD drives.

So is Toast Titanium 6 a viable option? The product description from the Roxio site makes it seem very promising.

Thanks for any advice.

[proton]

Although Apple says the Superdrives are only DVD-R drives, the Sony DW-U10A Superdrive in my PowerMac G5 certainly supports +R discs, as does the Pioneer drive that is also shipping in the PowerMac G5.

You may need to use Toast to burn the discs instead of the built-in burning software in Mac OS X (although I believe that 10.3 added +R support to the built-in software, I haven't tried it yet).

If you're intending on authoring DVDs using iDVD, then I'd suggest just using DVD-R discs to burn from iDVD, but in other cases using a +R disc will be fine. Note that (at least in Australia), -R discs are currently cheaper than +R discs anyway.

Mac OS X has no problems reading burnt +R discs on my machine either.

- proton

[Eug]

Get both, and the internal SuperDrive. I did.

iDVD does not work with an external drive as you know, and Toast and iDVD are complementary. Toast 6 certainly can't do what iDVD does, and vice versa.

[Kelvin]

Originally posted by Eug:
Get both, and the internal SuperDrive. I did.

iDVD does not work with an external drive as you know, and Toast and iDVD are complementary. Toast 6 certainly can't do what iDVD does, and vice versa.

Can you elaborate on what Toast 6 vs iDVD can and can't do? It appears from the Roxio website that you can add chapters and such to DVDs and that Toast even comes with the ability to create DVD labels.
What is the main advantage of iDVD over Toast?

I'm not sure what my friends PC burns DVDs in; DVD-R or DVD+R. They play fine on my Sony DVD player and he uses a VAIO desktop that he purchased about 6 months ago and the specs show its a DVD+R/DVD-R.

Thanks for any advice.

[Eug]

For DVD videos, Toast 6 will work, but iDVD stuff looks much better.

For data DVDs, iDVD is fairly useless.