[geeks] Princeton Univ. Surplus haul today...

[velociraptor]

On 8/23/06, Geoffrey S. Mendelson <gsm at mendelson.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 12:32:33PM -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote:
>
> > Someone else probably mentioned it, but there is a utility that I can't
> > remeber the name of that you will need to run to convince the consumer
> > Apple software to use a non-Apple drive.  Third party software and DVD
> > Studio apparently don't require the patch.
>
> Apple licensed the MPEG-2 codecs for use on machines with internal
> DVD drives. If there is no internal DVD drive, the installer simply does
> not install the codecs and Apple DVD player.

More DVD drives are recognized now.  There are various firmware
updates that can be applied to certain drive models to make them work
with OS X "natively" (most will work with Toast, etc, just not the
OS-based tools).

xlr8yourmac.com is probably the best place for investigating hardware
compatibility issues.  They have extensive info for CD-R/W, DVD-R/W,
graphics cards, firewire cards, scsi, etc.  I recommend finding a few
different drive/models you might want to buy, and then looking them up
in the xlr8yourmac DB to see if there are reports of them working.

=Nadine=