Sony Drx-840u -- Will It Work With Toast/mac Mini G4

[RichSad]

Hi. I am trying to determine whether buying Toast will solve a technical challenge I have getting a Sony DRX-840U external DVD burner to work with a G4 Mac running OS X 10.4.11.

 

I have a Sony DRX-840U external USB DVD writer. I'm using a Mac Mini with a 1.25GHz G4 with 1GB RAM running OS X 10.4.11. I tried to use the drive with iDVD and it did not work. iDVD ran for a while building the image to write to disc and then failed with a general DVD write error immediately when it went to write to burner.

 

Apple's system profiler shows the drive (output from system profiler for the DRX-840U at bottom of message). iDVD failed with a general error when it went to write to the DVD.

 

I am wondering if buying a more sophisticated DVD authoring program like Toast will help solve this problem. Does Toast have built-in drivers for popular hardware? I ask because Sony's support said "any major DVD burning software SHOULD work with this unit on a Mac with USB."

 

Thanks in advance to anyone with helpful advice.

 

Information from Apple System Profiler about the Sony DRX-840U

 

SONY DVD RW DRU-840A:

 

Firmware Revision: SS01

Interconnect: USB

Burn Support: Yes (Unsupported)

Profile Path: None

Cache: 2048 KB

Reads DVD: Yes

CD-Write: -R, -RW

DVD-Write: -R, -RAM, -RW, +R, +RW, +R DL

Burn Underrun Protection CD: Yes

Burn Underrun Protection DVD: Yes

Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO

Media: No

 

 

[tsantee]

Toast will burn to any drive that is recognized as a disc burning drive in System Profiler.

 

However, it may be that your Sony drive went to sleep while iDVD was doing the encoding and authoring of the video DVD file. What I recommend is using iDVD to save an image file rather than burn a DVD. (That option is in the File menu). Then use Disc Utility to burn the DVD from that Image File.

 

Toast has a lot of capability lacking in iDVD. Meanwhile iDVD has two major features lacking in Toast: One is the wonderful menus and the other is much-improved options for DVD slide shows. In all other ways I prefer Toast.