SuperDrive Offers More Burn Power
You will want a DVD burner soon. Maybe you want to burn home movies or digital camera pictures onto a DVD for friends and family. Perhaps you’re a video professional creating commercial DVDs and you need to test your work. Or maybe you’d like a device that lets you back up nearly 5 gigabytes on a single disc.
The Windows world is still struggling with funky DVD burning software and competing standards, but in the Mac world, DVD burners are becoming mainstream add-ons. A DVD burner can do everything I just mentioned--and also can burn audio CDs and play commercial DVDs and CD-ROMs.
What do you call a drive this versatile? Apple calls it the SuperDrive and has been building it into its pricier Power Mac G4 systems since March. Pioneer Electronics builds the SuperDrive for Apple, and several companies now sell the identical drive in external form. Plug the drive into your Mac’s FireWire port, and you can burn with the best of them.
I’ll explore each facet of DVD burning in future columns. This week, I want to share some discoveries I made while reviewing six DVD burners. My discoveries deal primarily with the Apple SuperDrive, though some also apply to third-party external burners that use the Pioneer mechanism.
My first discovery was that the SuperDrive is even more versatile than Apple would have you believe. Specifically, the SuperDrive and its third-party cousins also can burn so-called rewritable DVDs--ones you can erase and reuse. Abbreviated DVD-RW, these discs don’t play properly in some DVD players or DVD computer drives. But they work perfectly in SuperDrives and thus are great for backing up or creating test DVDs.
And although Apple’s Web site doesn’t say so, the new Mac OS X version 10.1 also supports DVD-RW. I used the Disk Utility program to erase a DVD-RW and then copied files to it by dragging their icons. I also burned DVD-RW discs in Mac OS 9 using Roxio’s Toast 5 Titanium software.
I asked Apple why it doesn’t promote the SuperDrive’s DVD-RW capabilities. The response: “Apple is evaluating that emerging standard to see if it will be generally accepted by customers.” Memo to Apple: Customers might accept the standard if you told them your drives already support it.
It’s true that most SuperDrive users will be burning conventional, “write-once” DVD-R discs. Economy is one reason: At $15 each, RW blanks cost more than twice as much as blank DVD-R discs. Compatibility is another concern: You’re more likely to have problems playing a DVD-RW disc in a consumer DVD player or computer DVD drive. But even if DVD-RW isn’t the main reason to buy a SuperDrive, it’s odd Apple doesn’t mention this capability.
My other discovery concerns the SuperDrives that shipped earlier this year. When burning a DVD, these older drives can be only half as fast as current SuperDrives and most third-party external drives. The slowdown occurs when you use DVD-R media from a company other than Apple, Pioneer, or Verbatim. Current SuperDrives--as well as most third-party drives with the Pioneer mechanism--can burn with any brand of media.
Here’s what hurts: Apple could fix the problem by releasing a software update that would bring older SuperDrives to parity with current ones. Original SuperDrives contain version 1.22 of Pioneer’s operating software, also called firmware. The slowdown was eliminated in version 1.44. You can determine a drive’s firmware version by using the Apple System Profiler.
Pioneer has posted a firmware updater on its Web site, but it’s for Windows systems, and Apple says it has no plans to issue its own updater. Some Mac users have removed their SuperDrives and installed them in Windows machines simply to run Pioneer’s updater. Apple should release a Mac updater that enables its SuperDrive customers to burn at full speed.
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Jim Heid is a contributing editor of Macworld magazine. He can be reached at jim@jimheid.com.
