DVD burner Recommendations

[aricher]

The SuperDrive on my office workstation has stopped burning/reading DVDs. Instead of buying an internal drive replacement our IT department wants to purchase an external drive that can be shared between machines. As the specs on these drives seem to change constantly I'm wondering what recommendations people here may have. I do have one questions though:

Can the newer dual-layer disks be read on my PowerBook 17 1.33 2X SuperDrive or on our other PowerMacs ComboDrives? If not I'll have to go with a regular DVD burner. Any buying advice folks?

 

[aricher]

bumpity bump

 

[eleveneastgate]

Search

My superdrive on my PB recently crapped out. I've read some where in MR that LaCie products were pretty good. You might wanna check "search" for the thread...

Hope this helps...

 

[Angelus520]

External DVD Burners - MacWorld

Check these out:

http://www.macworld.com/2005/02/reviews/duallayerburners/index.php

or

http://www.macworld.com/2005/05/reviews/lacied2/index.php

Hope this helps.

Chad

 

[Artful Dodger]

Hi, check out my signature for my external DVD burner.
It works great and the software that came with it is nice also. On Saturday I made a video from iDVD with some pictures and when it was time to burn I just clicked the burn button, put the blank dvd in and 3 mins. later I had a dvd burned from iDVD. It also works very well with Toast 6 Ti. and iTunes.
I find it's very quite and yes fast I use it with my eMac and my iBook in my signature.
Last I bought it from the LaCie web site but under the recons, $117 got it within 48 hrs. if I remember and it comes with a 90 day warranty.
If you need other info look for some of my past threads/posts on this...

 

[aricher]

Thanks everyone - looks like I'll be getting the Lacie 16x DL DVD+/-rw FW drive.Can the dual-layer disks be read by the normal internal combo/SuperDrives on macs?

 

[Artful Dodger]

aricher Thanks everyone - looks like I'll be getting the Lacie 16x DL DVD+/-rw FW drive.Can the dual-layer disks be read by the normal internal combo/SuperDrives on macs?

That I don't know yet since I haven't used that feature yet (will be trying it out this week) due to the price per disc is still high. If I use this feature today I will post back
Also nice choice for a burner

 

[Redneck1089]

That I don't know yet since I haven't used that feature yet (will be trying it out this week) due to the price per disc is still high. If I use this feature today I will post back
Also nice choice for a burner

So, did they work?

 

[wiseguy27]

Thanks everyone - looks like I'll be getting the Lacie 16x DL DVD+/-rw FW drive.Can the dual-layer disks be read by the normal internal combo/SuperDrives on macs?

Any DVD-ROM drive would be able to read "dual layer" or "double layer" discs - DVDs with two layers have been in use for many years by the movie industry (it's only in the last couple of years that consumers have been able to get drives that could write to such discs). So DVD drives have been able to read discs with two layers for several years now. If you're able to watch most movies on DVD on your internal combo/superdrive, then you wouldn't have any issue at all.

Note: "Dual layer" is a term used for discs that are DVD-R and DVD-RW. "Double layer" is the term used for discs that are DVD+R and DVD+RW. These are two different DVD format alliances comprising different companies. Nevertheless, most drives nowadays are compatible with both -R (dash) and +R (plus) formats.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Redneck1089
Quote:
Originally Posted by Artful Dodger
That I don't know yet since I haven't used that feature yet (will be trying it out this week) due to the price per disc is still high. If I use this feature today I will post back
Also nice choice for a burner



So, did they work?

Yes it worked fine thank goodness it was $6.00 for one disc but I needed to make sure my drive worked with all the options
Also DL is only "+" media at this time and can only reach 6x speeds with the Plextor DVD drive via a software patch www.videohelp.com has a list of ratings for media and speeds, also a good forum (second to here) for dvd info in the Mac forum...