Elephant in the Room

[Ray Bell]

Not a Mac product but Roxio Dvdit Pro HD works great...

[Barry J. Anwender]

Originally Posted by Steve Mitchell

BTW I do not have the Master CS3 applications, just Premiere Pro and Encore, burning to a Lacie external firewire drive...and Leopard.

Steve, I'd say there are two possibilities for Encore failing to produce working Blu-ray discs in your hardware configuration. The first one being the Lacie external drive which is not only 1st generation but was among the very first Blu-ray burners to ship--before the Blu-ray spec was finalized. Hence the reason to ensure that both your Blu-ray Burner and player have up-to-date firmware. Sony has been very diligent on providing firmware updates for their burners and Home Theatre players. To date there have been four updates to their Blu-ray players issued since October 2007.

Secondly Apple for what ever reason has crippled a Blu-ray specific protocol in the transport layer of OS 10.x. So for example the two internal SATA II ports on a MacPro's motherboard work 100% for burning regular 4/8 GB DVD's. These same ports fail to burn Blu-ray discs--I have personally tested this. I would make an educated guess to say that firewire ports suffer the same limitation. This is common knowledge in the Mac community. Adobe is aware of this shortcoming and they are waiting for Apple to activate this Blu-ray specific transport protocol. Thus, Adobe is in fact waiting for Apple to do its thing, not the other way around. I suppose this is one way for Apple to keep Blu-ray off their hardware. There is thread on this topic buried somewhere in the DVinfo forums and it was discussed at length.

HOWEVER, if you use the MacPro's EIDE cable that is attached to your existing "internal" CD/DVD burner, using the second connector for the Blu-ray burner--it works 100%. This is the route I have taken and as I've mentioned above, all works as advertised, no Blu-ray coasters to date. I have the internal Sony Blu-ray burner installed in the bottom slot and the stock CD/DVD burner installed in the MacPro's top slot. Also the newest Blu-ray drives are equipped with a SATA port. So an "inexpensive SATA-IDE bridge board" is required for using the MacPro's EIDE cable to communicate with the Blu-ray drive.

[Ned Soltz]

Interesting points.... I'm wondering whether an external SATA drive would work with a SATA card. I have a CalDigit 4-port SATA card in my MacPro and currently only using 2 ports for a raid. This could definitely have some potential.

[Steve Mitchell]

This all makes sense to me. Will go that route and see what happens. I'll search the forums for that Sony burner model number, but could you tell me what it is?

[Barry J. Anwender]

Originally Posted by Steve Mitchell

This all makes sense to me. Will go that route and see what happens. I'll search the forums for that Sony burner model number, but could you tell me what it is?

Steve, Sony BWU-200S is 2nd generation, burns 25/50GB Blu-ray discs as well as 25/50GB rewritable Blu-ray discs. I use rewritable during the prototyping phase as there always seems to be some detail with buttons or menu's that I forget. The rewritable discs take a little longer to burn as they are only half as fast as the write-once discs. Good luck.

[Steve Mitchell]

And the Sony burner uses the Mac EIDE cable? If not, is there a burner that does?

[Barry J. Anwender]

Originally Posted by Ned Soltz

Interesting points.... I'm wondering whether an external SATA drive would work with a SATA card. I have a CalDigit 4-port SATA card in my MacPro and currently only using 2 ports for a raid. This could definitely have some potential.

Ned, too bad about the CalDigit card, if you only need 2 external SATA ports.

Newer Technology has a handy little kit that makes use of the two SATA II ports on the motherboard of the MacPro and only costs $24.95. The instruction manual and cables are worth this alone because the ports are not easy to find or to get at. I can confirm that the kit and the 2 motherboard ports work with external SATA II drives in a raid or JBOD configurations. Cheers :-))

The kit is available from Other World Computing same day shipping.
Newer Technology eSATA Extender Cable - Add 2... (MPQXES2) at OWC

And yes you can also conclude that these motherboard ports are intended for Blu-ray drives/burners with SATA ports ... when Apple chooses to support them in a future OS upgrade rumored to be 10.5.6. And yes, the Newer Tech cables in this kit will sufficiently make their way into the two internal CD/DVD drive bays as I have tried them.

[Barry J. Anwender]

Originally Posted by Steve Mitchell

And the Sony burner uses the Mac EIDE cable? If not, is there a burner that does?

As mentioned all the new Blu-ray burners including this Sony which I use have SATA ports. So you will need a "SATA to IDE Bridge Board" so the burner can communicate with EIDE cable inside the MacPro CD/DVD drive bays. Take a gander over at:

Granite Digital

It is inexpensive at $29.00. There are other vendors who also provide these bridge boards.

Steve, I should also mention that you will need a 3 inch EIDE extender cable to work with this particular bridge board. The extender cable will then allow you to plug-in your existing CD/DVD drive in the upper bay as well as the Blu-ray drive with bridge board in the lower bay. I put the Blu-ray drive and bridge board in the lower bay so that the air flow to the MacPro's power supply is not disturbed in any way. Cheers!

[Steve Mitchell]

You've been a big help to me, and others too.