UDF, Sony, and Mac OS X

sfish

sfish

Fark Lover
My Dad is thinking of getting one of Sony's CD-based Mavicas and a new iMac. The camera is compatible with Mac OS X if it's conected via USB, but the CD media it burns is not. It uses a variant of UDF, but 10.2.1 just won't mount it.

Interestingly enough, Disc Utility can see it, show me it's name, and even activate the Mount selection in the Options menu when I select it, but still will not let me mount it on the desktop. I scoured the net looking for a solution and only found the Mac OS 9 solution from Roxio and ReadCD-MRW! from softarch, but neither add any new disc mounting abilities to Mac OS X.

Certainly SOMEONE has written a driver for X that will allow us to mount these CDs on our desktop! Does anyone know of a solution or someone I could bribe to develop one?
 
As much as I hate to do this (because I hate it when people do it to me)...

You should talk him into getting a camera that uses some other removable media format. Those disks are *expensive*. You can most likely get a camera with the same specs in a smaller form factor and save a few bucks too.

If you buy a compact flash camera, it will be smaller and you can buy a firewire CF reader to transfer the images to your mac at acceptable speed (USB is *not* acceptable by a looong shot).

I bought 3 Mavicas (the floppy-based ones some time ago) and ended up regretting it in the long run - thank god they were for work :D
 
Thanks for your feedback.

I agree that USB is not a good way to go and I'll try to push him toward something with a FireWire solution if nothing else. I'm not sure I agree that the media is expensive - especially in comparison to compact flash. A spindle of 10 Pocket CD-RW discs costs no more than $8. Less than a buck for 150MB of storage versus more than $0.50/MB for compact flash makes mini CD-RW discs a dirt cheap storage solution in comparison.

I do agree that the Mavica is too expensive, too large, and WAY too slow in writing the images to the CD-R media. I'll have to look around to see if there are any still cameras that come with Firewire built in.

Anyone else know if there is a UDF solution for Mavica CDs? I'm still curious.
 
I looked for still camera's with FW built-in. There are some, but they are much too high end for me (I'm in the market now looking at the $500-$800 category).

Unfortunately, I have not seen any FW readers for other media formats.
 
My Dad's since backed off the whole Sony-centric solution. He's looking in the same price range - maybe lower. Thanks so much for your input!
 
It just drives me crazy that I can't get my iMac to read the disk. When I bought it at the Apple store in Palo Alto the "genius" assured me that the computer I was buying would have no trouble reading the disk. It took an hour on the phone to have it confirmed that the genius had been wrong and that there was nothing I could do about it. Fortunately, I have a Windows machine here, so what I do is copy the disk from the camera onto a regular CD then put that in my Apple. A very inelegant solution, though.
 
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