Sorry this is so long, but I haven't been this disappointed in an Apple computer in a long while...<br><br>So, a thread or two down I mentioned wanting to make a DVD from QT movies. Simple with Apple's hardware of today right? Yes, if you own a superdrive. If you've purchased a nice $3,000 Powerbook you are pretty much out of luck without spending another, oh, $1500 or so. And even then...<br><br>Here's what I've been doing:<br><br>A lab next to mine just purchased a LaCie DVD-RW drive for their Dell that uses either firewire or USB 2.0. That sounded great, I could finally make DVDs to play on my powerbook or home DVD player. Cool.<br><br>Problem#1: You cannot use Apple's iDVD software without a certified Apple superdrive. Period. At first I thought that there must be some logical hardware-to-software reason for this, but it turns out that a few third-party manufacturers (Formac, among others) tried to make extensions to allow iDVD to work with their external burners. Apple threatened them and made them stop.<br><br>So, if you want to author DVDs with a powerbook you will need to purchase professional software, such as DVD Studio Pro, for about $1,000. Nice, huh. Well, being at a large institution I found someone with DVD studio pro so that I could try this out and see if it is something I wanted to invest in. I made the DVD on their powermac, using Apple media and Apple software. <br><br>Problem #2: I put the DVD into my powerbook and it won't even mount. It works fine on the mac that made it, a home DVD player and (oh boy) even the PC in the room next door. I can also hook the LaCie DVD burner to the powerbook and it mounts fine with that drive. But the powerbook drive works great for CDs, CD-R, CD-RW and DVD-ROM (Commercially prepared) so it is specific to DVD-R.<br><br>I did a search at Apple's discussion forums and came up with this thread with 27 replies of people with exactly the same problem with their G4 powerbooks starting back in April!! Apparently Apple is aware of the problem and has little or no plans to do anything about it. I don't know which bothers me more, the fact that Apple 1) either forces you to buy a desktop mac with a superdrive or else makes you pay up to $1,000 for DVD Studio pro or similar commercial application, or 2) that although the Powerbook G4 is pretty much the most expensive, high profile piece of hardware they make/sell, it doesn't even fit into their digital lifestyle routine. Seriously, you could buy an entire superdrive iMac for what it would cost to be able to burn DVDs with a brand new Powerbook!<br><br>I'll probably cool off a bit tomorrow but all I can say right now is, thank god I didn't rush out and buy a burner and $1,000 software of my own. <br><br>How about this for a switch ad: burn your DVDs on your mac.... but they will only mount on your PC <br><br>
iDVD works fine on my G4/500 that I put my superdrive into. I bought the internal superdrive at a 3rd party. <br><br>I read about it not working on external ones..sorry to hear that.<br><br>
Me too- I installed a Pioneer A04 drive into a dual 500 G4, and I've made iDVD discs that play on my machine, commercial players, Windows machine DVD players- you name it!<br><br><br>[color:red]Hold on...it's time for a</font color=red><br>
wow. So we have almost identical machines except for yours is dual and I think you have the gigabit?<br><br>I also put an ATI Radeon 8500 card in mine..64MB.<br><br>
Unfortunately for you and others... the "iApps" are made to entice you to buy Apple's premium products. Is it fair? Probably not, but perfectly within their rights, and quite frankly - all companies do it.<br><br>There are a VERY FEW 3rd party drives that actually do work with iDVD, but it takes some research to find out which ones - and even then, they probably won't work with the next update.<br><br>
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Ok, my anger has subsided a bit. The fact that iDVD2 is a free download makes it easier to swallow that they want it to be used with their hardware. But, it still screws powerbook users. Its an incredibly expensive machine that is supposed to be a mobile movie maker. But when it comes to DVD technology it is less useful than an eMac. That's not right. Since they cannot (understandably) squeeze the superdrive into a TiBook there should be something else that can be done to compensate that doesn't cost $1500.<br><br>Plus, it should be able to play any DVD media that a stupid PC can.<br>Oh, I better stop, I'm getting mad again...<br><br>
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