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Todd Madson · Aug 3, 2003, 03:28 PM

We bought a powered firewire case in order to place a DVD-ROM drive in so my wife could watch DVD movies on her new snow iMac. Her old iMac DV/SE had a DVD-ROM drive in it, the new one has a CD-RW.

I bought a cheap DVD-ROM mechanism at a
computer show for $20 figuring it would
do the job.

If I run a third party app such as VLC,
the player will run the movie but since
only the mac OSX DVD player runs with
hardware acceleration it is rather jerky since her iMac is a 600 mhz G3.

If I try to run the Mac OSX DVD player it claims the drive is not compatible.

So, what I need is a compatible drive to
place in that case.

Any ideas people?

icruise · Aug 3, 2003, 07:07 PM

The problem is not the drive itself, but the fact that the Apple DVD player searches for an internal DVD drive and if it doesn't find one, it won't launch. If you have an internal drive, you should be able to use your external drive fine, but in your case that sort of defeats the purpose. Do a search on the forums -- I believe some people posted info about a patch that will enable the DVD player to work without an internal drive.

Todd Madson · Aug 3, 2003, 10:18 PM

This works:
http://xvi.rpc1.org/playerpatch.html

I bought a firewire powered case and
an IDE PC based DVD-ROM drive and put it
in the case and used the patch and the
Apple DVD player works great.

Her iMac she had originally (iMac DV SE)
had a DVD-ROM player and she got used to
playing movies.

Her iMac she got down the line has CD-RW
capability but no DVD-ROM playback.

This solution works perfectly.

ae77 · Aug 4, 2003, 11:56 PM

Originally posted by Todd Madson:
This works:
http://xvi.rpc1.org/playerpatch.html

I bought a firewire powered case and
an IDE PC based DVD-ROM drive and put it
in the case and used the patch and the
Apple DVD player works great.

Her iMac she had originally (iMac DV SE)
had a DVD-ROM player and she got used to
playing movies.

Her iMac she got down the line has CD-RW
capability but no DVD-ROM playback.

This solution works perfectly.

Great tip. Thanks! My internal combo drive is busted from a drop. I've been thinking of replacing it with this solution of firewire case+IDE drive.