iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Professional Duplicating

Maybe you’ve organized a school play, and you want to sell copies of the performance to parents as a fundraiser. Maybe you want to send out “new baby” videos to your family circle. Or maybe you’ve used iDVD to create a video brochure of your small business’s products and services.

In each of these cases, burning the DVDs one at a time on your own Mac looks more and more like a time-consuming, expensive hassle.

When you want to make more than a handful of copies of your DVD, you might want to consider enlisting the aid of a DVD service bureau.

Technically, these companies offer two different services:

POWER USERS’ CLINICBurning the Unburnable

Apple says that iDVD requires an Apple SuperDrive to work with iDVD, but that’s not quite true. In fact, iDVD fans have had good luck with many Pioneer internal DVD-burning drives, including models 103, 104, and 105. (And no wonder: an Apple SuperDrive is, in fact, a Pioneer drive.)

But what about external drives? iDVD has been around for years; isn’t it time that Apple fix whatever glitch is limiting iDVD to internal Pioneer burners?

As with so many of life’s mysteries, the explanation has to do with money. Some of the technology in iDVD comes from the Motion Picture Engineering Group (MPEG), and when Apple licensed this technology, it agreed to limit iDVD to Superdrives. (The price of the royalties to MPEG is included in the price of the drive.) Needless to say, this policy is an annoying hassle if you have an external or ...