External FireWire (or USB) DVD Burner?

[the_macman]

I'm planning to buy an external DVD burner (either FireWire or USB) that I plan to use on my Compaq Armada E500 laptop and then play on a Pioneer DV-444 DVD player.

Would be grateful if anyone can share suggestions and experiences with regards to models, compatible media, etc.

Posts in the DVD players forum show the DV-444 can play DVD-R and DVD-RW's.

What should I buy?

Thanks in advance: The MacMan, Holland

[studio33]

I bought the Pioneer 104 firewire external.

Plugged it in and it works!

Nero has a 2 gigabyte limit. There is some work around to that, but I didn't want to mess with it.

Adaptec 5.(?) worked great for transferring data to DVD-RW disk.

That is why I bought it for, to store data files.

For video editing I use Pinnacle Studio 7. However, I bought Ulead Studio 6 because I can do some picture in picture with it.

Note: Studio 7 will do still picture in video, but Ulead Studio 6 will do video within video.

As I said, my main reason for buying the 104 was for data storage.

But, thought I might try my hand at making a DVD video.

Brought my 17 gig avi file up into Ulead studio 6 and clicked on "Create DVD", it rendered into a mpg2 and by following the wizard transfered it to DVD.

Plays excellent on the the computer and out to TV using a software DVD player. I don't have an actual DVD player, so I can't check that. (Out to TV using a Matrox G400 TV card).

It does take some time for all the rendering and burning, but since I have set aside this computer just for video, time isn't an issue.

Back to storage: I was surprised that it took about 60 mminutes to transfer 4 gigabytes of data back to the harddrive from the DVD-RW disk.

Actually took less time to burn the data onto the disk then it did to retrieve it.

It also does CD-R's really fast.

In summary, I am quite pleased with the Pioneer 104 for my purposes.

George