The drive also has LightScribe compatibility and will allow professionals to author Blu-ray movies using Adobe Premier Pro CS3's Encore software. Non-professionals can use Roxio's Toast 9 Titanium (with the Toast HD/BD plug-in) to author more simple BD movies.
The bare drive is meant for Mac Pro or Power Mac G4/G5 running Mac OS X 10.4 or higher and can only use the HD DVD and Blu-ray playback if using Windows XP/Vista through a Boot Camp partition.
The drive will retail for $500 USD with an external model selling for $750 USD.
According to the specs, the new "Blu-ray drive works with all DVD and CD media, and writes to both 25 GB and 50 GB BD-R and BD-RE (rewritable) Blu-ray disks. Speed specs for the new drive are 6X for 25 GB BD-R, 4X to 50 GB BD-R and 16X to DVD±R. It also burns at 4X speeds to DVD±R DL, 5X to DVD-RAM and 40X to CD-R media, among others."
For an extra $100 USD, MCE will bundle the drive with an installation package, software for Windows Boot Camp playback of both Blu-ray and HD-DVD and Toast 9 with the plugin. For $1300 MCE will ship the drive with the Boot Camp package, Toast, and Adobe Premier Pro CS3 with Encore.
Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 30 Jun 2008 18:49
