DVD burners + external enclosures = mac compatible? Help please!

[ghostboy]

Hi people. Please bear with me, I'm pretty clueless when it comes to stuff like this..

I am looking at buying an iBook 12", seeing as though they've just been updated and they're now pretty good value. Originally I was going to be buying a 12" PB with superdrive but now the gap has closed and there don't seem to be any updates on the horizon, the iBook seems like the way to go. And with the money I saved on an iBook, I was going to buy an external DVD burner.

I've looked around on eBay and found some burners that seem pretty good value, but they're in "external enclosures". After some confusion and research, I discovered you can buy these things to stick an internal burner in, and presto, you have an external burner. My question is, are they likely to be compatible with a Mac? I'm looking at http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=5133302674&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT and I emailed the person to ask but they haven't got back to me and time is of the essence, I would like to bid soon if it is compatible.. If you could help me out here with my query I would really appreciate it.

Thanks.

[robbieduncan]

Whilst the drives themselves (in external enclosures) are probably Mac compatable they will not work with most Apple programs (iDVD, iTunes and so on) which require Apple provided internal burners. To burn DVDs on an external drive you need Toast.

[the future]

There are ways to make iDVD work with an external burner, though: http://xlr8yourmac.com/archives/mar04/030904.html#S17093

[Solafaa]

To be honest i think u should get the external DVD-RW unless you are going to use iDVD, if you will be using it then get the internal DVD burner its simpler althou it will cost youa bit more

[wPod]

most external should work fine. except as stated with iDVD. but external are generally better because they are faster than internal. i think the highest speed internal is an 8x in the powermac right now, (though i dont see a spec on apple's site) and the highest speed external is 16x. so you should be good to go.

[ghostboy]

Thanks for the replies/advice. I'll go ahead and do some bidding :)