[jasongins]

I am having some difficulty with an external DVD burner. The drive is an older 8x DVDRW drive that I removed from my PC and placed in an external firewire/usb enclosure for use with my Mac Mini. While I am able to read from the drive, I am not able to write to the drive. Disk Utility reports the drive as a DVD-ROM and that it is not writeable. Oddly, it does recognize that I have placed DVDR media in it. Is my problem that the drive is just unsupported by OS X, or is it possible that the enclosure itself is creating the incompatibility?
I am trying to burn my first DVD from a disk image I created with iDVD. I mount the disk image and run disk utility. I click on the disk image and then click "Burn", but only the Mac Mini's internal Matshita CD-RW drive appears with no option to chose another drive. Any suggestions?
Below is the information exactly as reported by Disk Utility:
Name : Macpower
Type : Disk
Disk Identifier : disk1
Media Name : GENERIC DVD RW 8XMax Media
Media Type : DVD-ROM
Connection Bus : FireWire
Connection ID : 512382359634142
Device Tree : fw/node@1d202508900de/sbp-2@c000/@0:0
Locked : Yes
Writable : No
Ejectable : Yes
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : No
DVDROM : Yes
Optical Media Type : DVD+R
Location : External
Total Capacity : 0 Bytes
Disk Number : 1
Partition Number : 0

[Sammy_J]

Hmmm....
Perhaps the fact that you pulled your burner from a PC is the culprit. iDVD won't burn directly to an external burner due to licensing issues (techinically it can but them DVD police won't allow it - don't ask me why). But this is not your issue.
Have you looked at xlr8yourmac.com ? This website has a wealth of good information that may be able to help you out. I know for internal drives that are not directly supported by Apple (which seems to be just about all of them...) the Patchburn software acts as a "driver" to enable those burners to work to varying degrees of effectiveness. You could try Patchburn and see if it works. I have no experience with Patchburn and external drives.
Also, if you have it, try Toast. If not, Toast is really much better than disk utility and is well worth the cost if you intend to burn discs alot, I can't recommend it enough.
Good luck.
Sam

[jasongins]

I was trying to burn a disk image using disk utility (I am aware that iDVD will only burn to the internal superdrive if equipped). I did try patchburn, and it made the drive appear as a writeable drive, however it just wouldn't complete the writing process. I considered software such as Toast, but I think the answer is to try a more modern name brand drive in my enclosure. A new drive can be bought for about half the price of recording software.

[Sammy_J]

Again, I recommend you look through xlr8yourmac.com first before getting another burner. Even with a newer burner, I suspect you might run into the same problem. Burners that have been shown to work well with Macs (i.e. Pioneer) usually cost somewhere in the $60-$70 range and I believe you can get Toast for about $80.
My experience is only with internal drives so I am not familiar with the compatibility issues with home built external drives. But my guess is that the same firmware/driver issues that plagues internal drives of non-Apple origin will affect external drives as well. For your sake I hope I'm wrong cuz I'd also like to build an external FW drive but so far reluctant to do so!!
Good luck to ya.
Sam

[retcynm]

The combination of 10.4 and PatchBurn4 let's Macs use the great majority of DVD burners. The Pioneer DVR 110D is a very good quality DVD burner that is regularly available for less than $50. I've used this particular drive, both internally and externally, on numerous Macs with complete success.
Definantly check out xlr8yourmac for more VERY good info.

[ftaok]

Actually, with the latest version of iDVD, Apple has lifted the burning limitation from external FW DVD burners. So now, you don't need to use the Easter Egg.

[jasongins]

Sam - Thanks for directing me to xlr8yourmac.com. Lots of great information and real world experiences there.
retcynm - do you need to use patchburn4 with the Pioneer DVR 110D, or wil it work with the standard drivers? That drive can be bought for $39 plus shipping from newegg, and it seems people have had good success with it.

[retcynm]

I already had PatchBurn4 installed, when I first tried the DVR-110d on my Macs, so I'm not sure if it is required in 10.4 for full functionality. The Mac running10.3 that I tried it on did need PatchBurn3.

[blinky]

I have an external DVD burner/writer attached via USB to a G4, Patchburn installed...the burner will burn a DVD with Roxio but I can't get a movie to play with DVD player (valid DVD drive could not be found). I used the various utilities, it is there. Any ideas?
Thank you

[albloom]

Blinky, please tell us what your System Profiler says about that
external drive. Specifically the "disc burning" section. If it doesn't
say "Burn support: Yes ( Vendor supported)" I'd say that your
PatchBurn didn't take.
Perhaps you have PB for OSX 10.3 and you're running 10.4.