Power G5 drive rejects DVD+r DL and apple wont sell me a superdrive

[papahbear]

I'm not a big dvd burning type but have a need to record a 7 hour home movie (yes i know... scary...but the great grand parents love it...which scares me even more because I see my future).

So I discovered that, contrary to the apple website, my particular G5 will not burn a DL dvd. I suppose I missed out on the newer superdrives that were installed after I purchased my machine.

I asked apple support in an online chat (sales guy?) if I could buy a superdrive for my mac. The answer was a simple "no". apple doesn't sell the drives seperately from what he said to me after some prodding.

I know i'm not the only one to run into this but the mac being new to me is a bit of a unknown quantity. Searching the forum just turned up other people having similar problems and being told to use Apple brand DVD's. In my case that wouldn't work because my drive simply does not support dual layer disks.

any suggestions, even rude ones, are appreciated. thats how desperate I am.


Papabear

 

[sickmacdoc]

Well there is no reason whatsoever to try to buy a SuperDrive from Apple for a G5 to be honest. The optical drive is one of the very simplest things to swap out on a G5 and prices of a great DL capable 20x drives are right around $30, so forget Apple!

First off you can see a Do It Yourself guide from Apple here: DIY G5 Optical Drive Replacement

Here is the latest model of Pioneer drive at OWC for $30.99: Pioneer DVR116
The same drive from newegg.com for $29.99 is at: newegg Pioneer drive

Only one thing to note- be sure you get an optical with an IDE interface to be a stock replacement. Don't get one with a SATA interface. The two referenced above are both IDE drives.

 

[sickmacdoc]

On another subject I really do not think you are going to have any luck trying to encode 7 hours worth of video on one disk, double layer or not unless you want some horribly compressed video!

I would say that you really need to concentrate on making that a two disk set, each disk still being a double layer one.