Product Reviews

Writing DVDs has come of age. Until now, the discs you could write in a standard DVD re-writer had a maximum capacity of 4.7GB, which compared poorly with the much larger capacity, double-layer discs used to house DVD movies. However, three things have happened that make it possible for anyone with a reasonably powered Mac to burn DVDs housing the same amount of content as commercial DVDs with no additional compression.

Media manufacturers such as Verbatim have produced blank double-layer DVD discs, Roxio has produced a version of Toast that supports double-layer discs, and NEC and others have built a mechanism on which to record them. The LaCie 8x Double Layer DVD Rewriteable Drive is one of the first external devices to be built around that mechanism.

Sporting a silver and grey shell that complements Apple's Power Mac G5 and PowerBook ranges perfectly, the double-layer re-writer looks rather unassuming. It's larger than we've become accustomed to from optical writers in recent years: it's about an inch deeper than a 12in PowerBook and just over half as wide. Two FireWire ports sit alongside a socket for the external power supply on the rear of the device.

The LaCie's ability to write to DVD-R and DVD+R discs at 8x, DVD+RW and DVD-RW at 4x, and double-layer, 8.5GB DVD+R9 discs makes it an incredibly versatile and powerful recorder. It can, of course, also write and re-write CDs. It's important to note at this point that the double-layer

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capability in this device isin the +R format. This means it isn't compatible directly with Mac OS X, iDVD or DVD Studio Pro. However, you can burn double-layer DVDs using the supplied version of Toast 6 Titanium and, more importantly, you can create double-layer projects in DVD Studio Pro and save the project as a disk image that can then be burned in Toast. Moreover, a double-layer data disc can't be read by the DVD drive on your Mac: it can only be read on another double-layer burner.

We tested the drive by writing as much data to a Verbatim 8.5GB double-layer disc as we could. Despite being labelled as 8.5GB, in our tests Toast reported the capacity of the disc as being 8GB, and it took a little over 40 minutes to burn the disc, and the same time again to verify it. As noted above, the disc couldn't be read by the DVD drive in our Mac, but worked fine as an 8GB volume when inserted into the LaCie drive.

Double-layer discs are compatible with most DVD players. As such, if you do use this drive as a way of producing your own DVD projects on discs, you should have no problems distributing them to clients. The 8.5GB capacity is enough for about four hours of MPEG-2 video, but you'll need to take account of audio, subtitles and any multi-angle content when calculating the size of a project.

Double-layer DVD+R media is currently expensive: the Verbatime discs we used in our tests typically cost around £50 for five. However, the cost is likely to decrease as more discs are produced.

At £139, the LaCie 8x Double Layer DVD Rewriteable Drive is a no-brainer if you're looking for an external DVD burner, and it can be bought for around £110 online. It's a shame that support for burning double-layer discs is lacking in OS X, but hopefully this will soon be addressed. Even then, though, it's unlikely you'll be able to burn to this drive from iDVD, as Apple is currently firmly in the DVD-R camp. If this is important to you, you might want to wait a few months for double-layer DVD-R devices to make their debut.