[SteveJobs]

Hey,
my sister has a rather old iMac with 350 MHz and USB 1.1. She wants to watch DVDs and I said I'd do some research.

This is what I've found:
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/tg/...766952-8507264

The site says that this thing was mac compatible as well.
The question is: Do DVD-drives work over USB at all? Isn't USB way too slow? What about burning CDs, will this work?

A while back, I read that only 300 KByte/sec would be need to stream in DVD quality. This is 2,4 MBit/sec and USB delivers 11 MBit/sec. So this should work, shouldn't it? Does anyone know some details on this? Would be helpful

Maybe you have more ideas than I do.

Steve

[macgfx]

Your in luck, the iMac "350" has a Rage 128 VR so dvd playback should work, however you'll need this . USB 1.1 will be too slow, it will work for cd burning.

I'd also get 256mb of ram.

[tooki]

USB 1.1 is indeed way too slow for DVD playback. DVD requires an average of 3.6MB/sec of data, and it can peak at about 9MB/sec. (USB 1.1's maximum is 1.5MB/sec.)

An internal drive is a good solution, but I wouldn't choose that one. Instead, I'd get a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive such as this: http://www.powerbook1.com/idvdrwsl.html

DVD playback works in Mac OS 9 as well as in Mac OS X 10.1 and higher.

That said, the upgrade drives are far more expensive than a cheap DVD player that connects to the TV.

tooki