Rate SONY 820 UL/T DVD burner for burning iMovies-what's better?

I have an iMac G5 with internal CD burner, but not DVD burner. I do have the iDVD and iMovie software--so I installed this external driver to burn iMovie projects and after hours of messing around with my blessed iMac G5 and mystified SONY support techs finally learned it won't burn iMovie or Quicktime movies with Mac software bundle it comes with (Roxio Toast Lite 6..) Should I send back driver and get something else, or stick with it and upgrade to Toast 7? I am frustrated since the Sony/Mac software bundle leads you to believe you CAN burn your videos.

Hello Artcart,
the main difference between iDVD and Toast is, that iDVD is primarily an authoring software (it authors the structure of the DVD with possibility of multiple menus, movies/slideshows) while Toast is a disc burning app ( with the possibility of encoding movies for DVD).
If you look through the iDVD discussion board you'll find that most users adopt the "divide and conquer" method:
1. Author the DVD in iDVD because it gives you more choices for menus etc.
2. Create a disk image (a file that behaves like a DVD, but is stored on your HDD)
3. Burn the image file to DVD with Toast (more reliable for burning)
I should be able to select/drag my (NTSC formatted) iMovie project into Toast and the SONY drive will indeed burn a nice DVD for me?
Absolutely. Toast does the encoding, but offers you only a very simple menu (start-up screen). if that is sufficient for you, you can do without iDVD.
To add this: I've been using an external LaCie burner for the last 2 years to create DVDs for a living, and have had a very low failure rate .... no worries
I am not sure what "menu" selection you mean--the "play" title menues offered in iDVD?
Yep.
hope this helps
mish

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