PB Buying advice please

I

infinii

Registered
Hello,

I will be buying a new x86 based desktop soon and wish to complement it with a Powerbook.

My question is regarding peripherals such as the DVD writer. I would like to burn dvd's on both machines, so I've thought of getting an external USB2.0 or FW enclosure and putting a dvd burner in there. That way I can move it between both machines. However, I've read that iDVD/iMovie doesn't work with external burners.

If I get the superdrive (which doesn't support both +- formats) is it possible to burn dvd images/isos/bin+cue that have been created on a PC? Isn't the dvd+r format more popular? A friend of mine brought over a dvd-r and I could only view it on 1 of 3 dvd players in my house. Will I have same problems with the movies I create with this Superdrive?

Also, I already have a Linksys WAP. So all I want is the PB to be able to use that. Do both 15" PB's have the wifi card built in already? "AirPort Ready" and "AirPort built-in" is a bit confusing. I thought the AirPort was Apple's WAP. Why would you want a WAP built in the laptop?

I really wish the 12" PB had a high resolution, it's more in my price range. :(
 
If you have Toast 6 you can burn images from the PC on the DVD drive in the Powerbook. You are correct that iDVD cannot burn to an external DVD drive. iMovie just edits the footage, it doesn't do anything with DVD's. You can take a movie created with iMovie and burn it as a video DVD using Toast 6, but you won't get all the fun menu stuff you get with iDVD.

As for compatibility, it all depends on the DVD player. DVD-R is normally the most compatible of the two formats. On the 3 players that you tried, did the two that failed work with a DVD+R? Alot of DVD players, especially older ones, won't work with any kinda of writeable DVD technology. See http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Art...Headline=DVD Media Format Compatibility Tests for a compatibility test, their tests showed DVD-R/RW ran on 96% of DVD players, whild DVD+R/RW only ran on 86%.

Airport ready means you can buy an airport can and install it, airport built-in means it ships with the card installed by default. The AirPort base station is the WAP, the AirPort card is the client, the term AirPort is Apple's trademarked terminology for 802.11 (like most PC companies are using WiFi now to describe it).

Brian
 
Brian,

Thanks for the response.

One dvd player was a cheapo made in china brand that I use for crappy vcds/svcds. The other was a Sony 990 home theatre in a box. Suprisingly, the player that it *did* work on was my oldest player, the trusty Pioneer 343.

Airport: Ok, so that means I need to buy the wifi card if I opt to go with the combo-drive PB, or I could BTO I guess.

If I'm going to be using iMovie to edit home video's etc, is 60GB enough? I've heard that DV editting takes alot of diskspace.
 
Video from a MiniDV camcorder is around 12G/hour of disk space (the MiniDV spec is 3.6MB/sec). So, depending on how much footage you are editing,and how much you want to keep online, just start doing the math :)

Brian
 
As for the resolution of the 12" PB, having the Rev A one, i must say that yse, sometimes it would be nice to have a higher resolution but it´s not as bad as you might think. It works pretty well for Photoshop (can´t say anything about editing movies thoug) but then again everything is relative.

Also, don´t forget that the 12" i at least 0.5 Kg lighter than the 15" and imho, easier to carry around due to smaller size. I´d say the Rev B with 1 Ghz 7457 with 512 kB cache is plenty fast as well, the only other limitation except clockspeed and screensize is the amount of memory you can install, the 12" takes a maximum of 1,25 GB whereas (i think the 15" and 17") can have up to 2 GB. This is due to the 12" having only one memoryslot and 256 MB memory built in, the 15" and 17" have to memoryslots and no built in memory.

Go check them all out in a store before deciding. You´ll see how much more portable the 12" will feel to the others. Then again, if you don´t plan on carrying it around much, get the 15" if you can afford it.
 
cp-man,

I've become accustomed to carrying around a Thinkpad T23 which I would imagine is approx the same size as a 15". Can anyone confirm if a 15" PB is about the same dimensions as a Thinkpad T series?
 
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