Do I really need to buy an external drive to burn DVDs on my eMac (10.4)?

Question

I have been trying to burn DVDs (using DVD-Rs, not DVD+Rs) on my eMac (OS 10.4) without success. The machine just acts as if nothing has been put in the drive; it whirrs and whirrs, no icon appears, no error message, nothing, until after half an hour or so I have to just eject it. On another forum, I was told that the problem was probably that my eMac can't recognize blank DVD-Rs, let alone burn them, without an external drive that has to be purchased separately. I want to be sure that's really true before buying anything, needless to say!
Another string on this forum suggested looking under "optical drive" under "About This Mac" to find out this kind of thing. I see nothing that specifically says "optical drive," but under Hardware and Disc Burning, it says:
HL-DT-ST RW/DVD GCC-4481B:
Firmware Revision: 2.05
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipped/Supported)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
Burn Underrun Protection CD: Yes
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw
Media: No
Is this enough information for someone to please be able to tell me whether I do indeed need to buy an external disc drive before I can burn DVDs?
(And, if so, what kind of drive is recommended?)
Thanks in advance for any help.
Chris Roth
[email protected]

Answer 1

While you can replace the intenal drive, opening up an eMac is not a trivial process and it's far easier to add an external drive. Go with Firewire rather than USB, even if your eMac is USB 2.0; support for Firewire under OS X is better and more stable.You can get a Firewire enclosure for around US$30 to $40 and a bare DVD-RW/CD-RW for about the same; or buy a complete system for around US$130 to $200 depending on features such as third-party burning software (Toast) or built-in label making with special DVD-R or CD-R blanks (LightScribe). OS X 10.3.3 and higher (which of course includes the 10.4 in your profile) includes native support for DVD-R burning, so you don't strictly need third-party software such as Toast, but Toast is more flexible than the built-in burner and allows for packing more data on a disc since Toast has better control over the disc's directory size. LightScribe is an appealing idea, but slow, and the blanks are expensive. When consideringf whether to roll your own, so to speak, with an enclosure and bare drive, don't overlook that you'll need a good-quality Firewire cable; cheap cables can cause a surprising amount of grief. Unless you have a bare DVD-RW drive handy, I persoanlly find the convenience of a commercial drive, with cable and power supply/cord already packaged together, outweighs the savings of assembling a drive yourself. I'm partial to LaCie D2 Firewire drives myself, but there are other models that work fine.