I'd like to get an external DVD burner for an eMac (OSs 10.2 & 9.2.2, 700MHz). From what I understand Lacie and Sony make decent multiformat burners that come with DVD authoring software. Does anyone have any suggestions to make, or advice to give?

(I just found a brand new Sony DRU710A for $75. Has anyone used this one? Should I go for it?)

Thank you.

You need software for 2 things. Creating your DVD and burning it.

As I'm sure you know, iDVD does not support external DVD burners. When every Mac with a DVD burners comes with excellent DVD mastering software for free, it doesn't leave much of a market for cheapo authoring software for the Mac. I'm not sure you'll find much of anything.

However, if you upgrade to iDVD 5, they added the ability to export your DVD to an image file. That lets you use image burning software such as Toast to burn the disc. If you pursue that route, you should check Toast compatibility with the drive you want. You may have to upgrade your OS X to run iDVD 5. Not sure.

Stylianos,

Look up patchburn. It is a utility that allows iDVD to burn to external drives. I haven't used it personally, but there are a lot of references on the Mac forums that say it works great.

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I used a Lacie burner with my Power Mac for a long time before finally getting a super drive, and I was fairly happy with it. I could do just about anything with it I could do with a Superdrive, it just required some workarounds - it's not quite one-touch simple like iDVD.

The software that comes with Lacie is okay - it's like iDVD Lite, if you can imagine. However, the Lacie software will also let you burn your DVD Studio Pro created Audio and Video TS folders with no problem - far easier actually than Toast did.

The downside of the external drive is that Apple DVD player and iDVD won't work with it, though I did try the patch to make iDVD work with it, and the results were okay, but took quite a while. I didn't do that much, mainly because I make all my DVDs with DVDSP.

An internal drive is far more efficient because that's what all the software is written for, but if you're using a Mac without one, a Lacie external drive will do everything you want it to.

As Ernest says, iDVD 5 won't burn directly to an external DVD burner...but you can use the 'save as disc image' command and *then* use the Disk Utility to then burn the DVD to your external drive.

You may consider getting an Pioneer drive and install it internally on your emac--it's cheaper...I've seen DVD-R drives for $45.00!

This guy has a hack to use external drives with iDVD...

http://homepage.mac.com/geerlingguy/mac_support/mac_help/pages/0015-burn_idvd_other.html

do not get the sony drive, the pioneer is more reliable.

You may have to upgrade your OS X to run iDVD 5. Not sure.

You need a minimum of OSX 10.3.4 to run iDVD 5. Of course Apple doesn't sell 10.3 anymore, just 10.4. You might be getting into a whole can of worms making that switch with your older mac, and you'd have to buy both iLife and Tiger which would cost a couple hundred bucks.

Can you really replace the internal drive in an eMac by yourself? Well, I'm sure it can be done, but it would only be a job for someone who is comfortable cracking open the case and tinkering with hardware.

Also, your machine is right on the borderline of the iDVD spec which calls for a minimum 733mhz G4.