Getting The Externalized DRU-700A To Actually Work
Well, what I'd built last night didn't work (see yesterday's post), so it was back to square one.
I went ahead and exchanged the USB 2.0 enclosure for an ME-320X combination USB 2.0/FireWire enclosure, connected it to the G4 PowerBook via FireWire, and fired it up. But this time, I went ahead and also downloaded the beta of PatchBurn II for OS X and installed it. This changed the drive's Disc Burning status in OS X's System Profiler from "Not Supported" to "DRDeviceSupportLevelUnsupported". However, when I tried to record a DVD Studio Pro 2 project to DVD from within the application, I ended up with the same result as last night.
One final try. I then used DVD Studio Pro to write the DVD to the hard drive as an IMG file, then pulled the Video_TS and Audio_TS folders (not the IMG file itself) into a new DVD project within Toast 5.2.3. Not only did the IMG file creation take less time than writing to a DVD from within DVD Studio Pro, but recording the 1.7G DVD project to the blank DVD in the DRU-700A only took ten minutes ... which is a whole lot faster than DVD Studio Pro writes to DVD!
So, I now have a portable dual-layer DVD burner that works fine when burning single-layer projects created by DVD Studio Pro. And I don't need to go back to Windows at all to make it work. I'll test dual-layer DVD's once the media's available.
Tomorrow, I'll put a spare FireWire card I have in my XP Pro box and see if this portable version of the Sony DRU-700A still works with the drive's bundled Nero software.
Till then ...