On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 16:28:44 -0800,
lid wrote:

Does anybody know if these exist, or are coming out any time soon?

Yeah, sort of. If you buy an external ATAPI enclosure, you can shove
in any 5" ATAPI/IDE drive. That includes the multitude of ATAPI DVD
burners. Since LG has internal drives that meet compatibility
criteria, if you buy one of those and an enclosure, you're set.

The considerations for enclosures basically comes down to chipset
(some are better at DMA support than others), connection (Firewire or
USB2.0). Other considerations might be physical size (some use an
internal power supply, others use an external power "brick" or "wall
wart"), and personal taste in styling.

I won't even presume to recommend one over another, as I've not had a
need for an external drive so far, so I haven't looked into it all
that much.

In case you didn't get the abbr, I'm talking a dual layer DVD burner that
can do: DVD +R, -R, +RW, -RW, RAM, as well as CD +R, - R, +RW, -RW.

If someone doesn't get your earlier abbreviations, how will throwing
more abbreviations (some of them totally made up) clear things up?

There's no such thing as CD+R or CD+RW. CD-R and CD-RW fall under the
Philips standard. If you want to nitpick, use the dash to be
technically correct, but for the most part I'd consider it optional.

That said, AFAIK there is only one released standard for dual layer
burning (I think +, but I can't remember) and I'm not sure if it can do RW
or just R.
Anybody know anything about any of this?
Rumors count

Nope. There are actually two standards formalized now. Dual layer
DVD-R (DVD-R DL) was recently formalized by the DVD forum (this makes
it the "official" dual layer standard, whatever that means now).
Straight form the horse's mouth:

http://www.dvdforum.org/forum.shtml

You already know about DVD+R DL from the "rebel" alliance.

http://www.dvdrw.org

I haven't seen any DVD-R DL discs yet though, but a few drive
manufacturers have promised firmware updates to existing DVD+R DL
drives to add the DVD-R DL burning support (eventually).
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MCheu