[P1] What type of drive is needed to make vcds?

[George Slusher]

>I have just the cd rom drive. Should i buy a dvdr drive or a cdrw drive. 
>Thanks josh

It depends upon what you want to do and how much you want to spend. A 
FireWire CD-RW drive will be much cheaper and much faster at burning CDs 
than a DVD-R drive. For example, Small Dog Electronics (one of my 
favorite sources) has several FireWire CD-RW drives:

EZQuest CDRW FireWire 52x24x52x w/Charismac       $115

LaCie FireWire CDRW 52x/24x/52x (300566) D2       $125
 (Includes the "light" version of Toast)

LaCie FireWire CDRW 52x/24x/52x P5 Porsche        $ 97


Their DVD-R drives are more expensive and slower:

LaCie DVD+/-RW FireWire for Mac                   $289
DVD 4x2x12x/CD 16x8x32x (includes Toast Titanium Lite)

LaCie DVD-/+RW drive Firewire Porsche P5          $265
 (includes Toast Titanium lite & CaptyDVD)

LaCie DVD-R/-RW/RAM/CDRW Combo drive Firewire D2  $325
DVD 2x1x12x/CD 12x8x32x (includes Toast Titanium lite)

You can check prices elsewhere, as well, but they'll be close except for 
specials. 

The speeds refer to Write/Rewrite/Read. The CD-RW drives can write an 
entire CD in about 1:35. The fastest DVD-R drives, while faster than 
Apple's SuperDrive, would take more than 3 times as long, close to 5 
minutes. However, if you are making Video CDs, the actual writing/burning 
time isn't much of a factor: it can easily take 10 times the running time 
of the movie to render a movie into VCD format. 

(A warning: not all DVD players can read all Video CDs--it can depend 
upon the brand of the disk, for one thing. You might have to experiment.)

Another factor is the price of the media. DVD-R disks are much more 
expensive than CD-R disks. 

When I can afford it, I'll get a fast FireWire CD-RW drive. The 
SuperDrive in my G4 iMac is quite slow--max write speed is 8x. The faster 
drives would be more than 6 times faster. (A caveat, though: not all CD-R 
media is certified for 52x; the fastest I have is certified for 48x. A 
full 80-min/700 MB CD-R would take about 1:40+ to burn at 48x, not 
counting the time it took to prepare the data.)


George Slusher/Eugene, OR
gslusher at rio.com