Hi all,
I echo Esther's comments below with respect to the external DVD
burners. We have attempted this at school with external DVD burners
and with external firewire drives for some iMovie applications and had
less than perfect results. I will mention though that this was on
older machines than a MacBook but the experience has stopped us from
going that direction. If you have no need of iMovie and such than go
ahead and use the external burner but otherwise, I wouldn't recommend
that option.
Esther said: I should have been a bit more specific on the
SuperDrive vs. Combo
Drive (DVD burner) issue for MacBooks. You mentioned in your podcast
that users might be able to use an external DVD burner and possibly
save money on the MacBook purchase. I'd heard that there is a
possible
problem with the tight integration of some software programs such as
iMovie and iDVD with an external DVD burner. At one time third-party
vendors such as Other World Computing used to offer external firewire
burners with a software package (DVD Enabler) that supported the
iDVD program options. My understanding is that you can't get the
tight integration of software with DVD hardware for some of the Apple
applications like iDVD if you use an external DVD burner, but I don't
have any experience of this myself.
Later...
Tim Kilburn
& Carter the Canine
Fort McMurray, AB Canada
