No name DVD writers and Panther

[hugov]

Hey everyone,

Hear is the deal - for those of us who dont have an internal superdrive and want to burn dvd's, we need to buy an external writer. It appears the only brands of external dvd writers for mac on the market use the pioneer DVD burners, A104, A05 or A106 - - are these the only dvd burners panther supports? Would, say, an asus internal dvd burner in a 5.25 inch firewire case be supported by panther? there is very little info out there about compadibility or firewire cases and dvd writers....can anyone help me find out if panther does support other brands?

Thanks

 

[NP3]

there are a lot more burners available to use: I put a sony DW-U14A in my AGP graphics computer and it works great (with modified drivers). I haven't tried it with panther, but i assume it will work...anybody else?

actually the pioneer 105.. etc drivers can be bought as internal drives that act just like an apple superdrive (its the same drive)

my internal sony acts just like a superdrive.

check out http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ for more info

 

[jtown]

Re: No name DVD writers and Panther

Originally posted by hugov
there is very little info out there about compadibility or firewire cases and dvd writers

I'm not quite sure which part you're asking about. Are you asking which burners are compatible with OSX or are you asking which burners can be put in firewire cases? All of the EIDE/ATAPI burners can be put in firewire or USB2 cases.

As for which ones will be recognized natively by OSX, look at xlr8yourmac's drive compatability database. One thing to keep in mind is that not all of Apple's applications will work with an external burner, even if it's fully supported by OSX. Even a Pioneer A06/106 in a firewire case won't work with iDVD even though it will be "fully functional" as far as OSX is concerned. It'll work fine with itunes and you'll be able to drag-and-drop onto blank media but iDVD won't work.

FWIW, I got a Pioneer 106D from newegg recently and it works great with my G3/800 ibook using a firewire case that I originally got with a Sony CDRW quite a while back. It's had 3 CDRWs and now a DVD burner in it. All I had to do with the ibook was plug it in. OSX's built in DVD support handles it just fine.

If you want to use a different burner (like that 8x Asus), check the database on xlr8yourmac. It's possible to patch the OS to accept just about any burner as a superdrive, tho you still won't get iDVD support.