dvd burning conflictions

[bursty]

when i was buying my 15" PB recently, the salesman said to be sure to buy the superdrive, b/c no other dvd burners would work with iLife....however after browsing around here for a bit, i have come up with a few posts about people using burners other then the superdrive with iMovie and iDVD. So, was the salesman straight up lying just to make a few extra bucks on the superdrive? i would still like to get the aftermarket for my dads non-superdrive powerbook

any info would be appreciated

 

[johnnyjibbs]

iDVD requires an internal SuperDrive. You can still create projects on a non-Superdrive Mac and then "Save as Archive" to get the project onto a Mac that does have a Superdrive to burn the video DVD. Unfortunately, you can't use this saved file in a 3rd party burning program to get around the limitation placed by Apple.

I think generally the other iApps only support built-in burners (certainly for DVD archiving) but I'm not sure. I got the Superdrive because I wanted to be able to use iDVD and it comes in very useful anyway for backing up and stuff (without having to carry round an external).