A great article for the Mac on determining your drive type is on MacWorld and PC World

Original article is by Kris Fong, Macworld.com   Macworld Buying Guide: Optical drives

small quote on this “..To see which formats are supported by the optical drive in your Mac, click on the Apple menu and select About This Mac. Click More Info, which opens System Profiler, and in the left Contents column under Hardware, select Disc Burning. The right pane displays all formats your Mac can read and write. Pay attention to the “write” formats, noting the “+” and/or “-” stats, and purchase discs that bear this info.”

Macs have been tricky with the orginal superdrive which was DVD-R only.

Sans Digital RAID Video array

It’s an interesting process to put together a video for DVD recordable.  First you have to have a camcorder that records Digital Video or “DV”.  MiniDV is the most popular and what I use.  Recording can proceed in any order you like.  This can all be edited later into clips and rearranged  so it a matter of convenience.   After you have recorded enough material for your DVD movie then you are ready to load it up into your hard drive for editing.   It’s important to have editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro and a scratch drive like the Sans Digital MOBILESTOR 2UT which works great for editing.  It has two SATA hard drives running in RAID 1 (mirrored drives).  This gives great performance and with the FireWire connection high speed with video.  The MOBILSTOR 2UT provides a USB 2.0 connection (very useful for formatting the drives) and a FireWire 800 connection that can be used with the 1394A standard  FireWire400.   FireWire is faster in video applications then USB 2.o    USB 2.0 works fine in a lot of applications (slow in transfer but it works) so I’m not telling anyone to go run out and buy FireWire unless you are editing video. I transfer the MiniDV tape contents to the scratch drive and then import the file into Adobe Premiere pro.  Then I cut up my video and arrange it into some kind of sequence (a script would be nice)  Bring in my audio clips and then it can be encoded for DVD or various player formats.