hi people thanks for reading new to this mac thing and i have a question that i am getting mixed answers on so here it goes.

i have got a 15in flat panel imac cdrw on board and what i want to do is add a dvd burner now so far i have been able to find out that if i buy a pioneer which is the oem that apple uses it will be ok with the ilife software if it was fitted internally.

but here is the kicker i want use an external so that i can use it with my windows based laptop as well.

if there is anyone out there who can give me a defininite answer one way or the other or could point me in the right direction.

many thanks and light to you all

External DVD burners will work with iDVD if you apply a patch, you can download this all over the internet and you just put the 2 files in your home directory.

I recently bough a Pioneer 16x Dual Layer DVD burner for my generic USB 2 / Firewire case. Apple haven't used this one in any of their machines yet but I used patchburn 2 and it now works with iTunes iDVD etc, worked with toast from day 1. These drives are down to 160 or less now and I see no reason to buy any other DVD burner unless you want something cheaper. I don't think DVD burners are going to get much faster for a while.

EDIT - Although I've burnt discs from iTunes and iPhoto I haven't burnt anything from iDVD yet, it does however give me the option. The patch also allows you to save projects as a disc image so you can burn in Toast or another program, this would allow you to transfer them to another machine if you don't have a DVD burner at all.