2004-03-14

Tip for Burning in iDVD to External DVD Burners

According to Accelerate Your Mac! it is now possible to use iDVD with an external dvd burner. I have not tried this but this person and others have had success:

Here's a tip from a reader email today - I just tried this here with a PB G4, 10.3.2/iDVD 4.0.1 and an external FW cased PX-708A plextor DVD burner (with a DVD-R disc of course) - and it allowed selecting the PX-708A drive as the target burn drive.

" http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=23370
Put the file into your Private folder. (put the 2 files from the download there in your User folder) Control-Click iDVD's "burn" button.
Cheers, Joachim "

The download file unstuffs to 2 files in a folder (w/Adobe PICT resource file icons) - copy them (not the folder) to your root user folder, then launch iDVD and when pressing the burn button - hold down the "Control" key. (A dialog should pop up with available drives to burn to). The burn to my PX-708A (in OWC Firewire case) hasn't completed yet but it did allow selecting the drive as a target (listed both the internal PB G4 superdrive and the PX-708A drive - I chose the PX-708A).

Update - the burn completed successfully to my PX-708A. (Disc mounts/plays fine.) I used iDVD 4.0.1 but the trick works on iDVD2 and iDVD3 also according to readers.

As to why this works (having the 2 files in the user folder) - my guess is this is a way for testing iDVD burning with a wider range of drives that the programmer left in the code. (Easier to test new drives in FW cases than swapping internal drives).