DVD Burner Device Profiles and OS X 10.5 & 10.6

CD, DVD and (Ultra HD) Blu-ray Writers
#1

This question is for my Mac and OS X comrades:

When I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard, I had a bunch of device profiles left over from my use of PatchBurn in Panther and Tiger. When I look at these drives now under system info in Leopard, it says they are vendor supported.

My question is, should I leave the old device profiles there, or should I delete them? I know where they are and how to remove them, but I’m curious because the author of PatchBurn implied that they no longer had any purpose under Leopard, and that the OS ignored them. Yet, under Leopard, there are still three different types of drive support, Generic, Vendor, and Apple, so if Apple didn’t intend for there to be vendor supported drives, why does it still seem to recognize the profiles? Did the author of PatchBurn really know what he was talking about, or did he just make up an excuse to explain his abandonment of the project?

The heart of my question is, do device profiles for DVD drives still have any purpose under Leopard or Snow Leopard? Does it matter whether a particular drive is supported generically or has a device profile and is recognized as vendor supported?

#2

My limited testing & previous Google searching show the full range of functions is available on drives marked for generic support in Leopard & Snow Leopard, and there is no performance/feature loss in comparison to drives with “Apple shipping” support. This is only with 3 external drives, but the drives were not throttled in any way in regard to burn speed or burn capabilities with Finder/Disk Utility.

I don’t think there’s any reason for profiles other than to tell the user what is and isn’t directly supported, as configured, by Apple. …Maybe it also lets us know not to expect to be able to update the firmware with help from Apple, if there ever comes a time firmware update tools come out for OS X.

#3

[QUOTE=Albert;2483774]Maybe it also lets us know not to expect to be able to update the firmware with help from Apple, if there ever comes a time firmware update tools come out for OS X.[/QUOTE]

You mean official tools, correct? Obviously, we already have unofficial flashing tools like DVRFlash (Pioneer) and Binflash (NEC/Optiarc) for OS X.

#4

Right, official tools. Sorry, I missed that key adjective.