SuperDrive Options for Combo Drive PowerBooks?

inblosam asks: "I have a 800 Mhz PowerBook G4 Titanium. It has a combo drive so I can read/write CDs and read DVDs. I would REALLY like to make DVDs, but what is the best route? I know of one solution that will give me the upgrade for $400 so that is an option. But if they can get a hold of a superdrive and install it, why can't I? Where are they buying these or how do I find out how to get one for myself? Cheaper would be better, naturally. Is installing them a big factor? I also saw another DVD upgrade for the PowerBook, but it doesn't mention running iDVD, which would be one of the requirements for me actually upgrading. Otherwise I would just buy an external DVD burner."

Comments

External..

[DamienMcKenna]

Get an external Firewire bay and a $150 4G DVD-RAM drive and burn DVDs to your heart's content. Of course it'll be an external drive vs a nice built-in one, but it'll be much more affordable than what Apple will offer. And as a bonus you'll get the most compatible DVD standard (DVD-R) _and_ the most reliable backup standard in one shot (DVD-RAM).

firmware?

[johnpaul191]

i thought there was some issue with the drive's firmware? in that people swapping the exact same model drive bought through a 3rd party would not function with iDVD...... but maybe the new iDVD fixes that as another post mentioned. i know the older versions of backup.app were not functional with external CD-Burners.... i thinkt hey finally tweaked that, but it had been an issue

Re:Reason Why iDVD doesn't work w/ External DVD-RW

[illumin8]

I'm sorry, but IMO this is a ploy by Apple to sell more hardware. I have an external Firewire/USB 2.0 (Oxford 1911 chipset) Pioneer DVR-A105 on my PC and it works great. I can use any DVD burning application in exactly the same manner as I would if it were an internal drive.

Also, in tests I've run, the CPU utilization using an external burner is much lower due to the fact that when you're using an internal burner, your IDE bus uses CPU cycles to handle reads/writes. When you're using Firewire, those writes are passed off to the Oxford chipset and offloaded from your main CPU.

Burning a DVD using RecordNowMAX with an internal drive uses about 7-10% of my CPU on an Athlon XP 1700, where using the external burner my CPU useage averaged only 2-3%, just barely above idle.

Not to mention another advantage of an external burner: It's not tied to one computer. I don't need to spend an extra $200 for every computer in my house. Want to burn a DVD or backup some data off of the computer in the next room, no problem. Have a friend that wants to burn a DVD but doesn't have a burner? Just bring it over to his house one day.

All of these advantages mean that an external burner is far better than an internal one. The fact that Apple put a limitation in iDVD that doesn't allow burning with any external burners just means they want to force you to buy more hardware from them. I don't like limitations like that. Anyone know of a way to hack iDVD to allow external burners?