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rich82fox · May 29, 2006, 06:36 AM

hi

does anybody know what software the black apple macintosh 5500 all-in-one units had for watching tv with the build in tuner card?

rich

BigBadBiologist · May 29, 2006, 08:10 AM

My 6400 (or was it a 6300) used the apple video player under OS8/9. There was a setting for selecting the TV tuner as your source.

Big Mac · May 31, 2006, 12:18 AM

Was it really officially called Power Mac 5500 TV? I thought the only model with TV in its name was Macintosh TV.

tooki · Jun 2, 2006, 08:22 PM

No, TV was not part of the name.

tooki

dpaanlka · Jun 10, 2006, 10:02 AM

It's called Apple Video Player, and it came bundled with Mac OS 7 and 8, and probably 9 too. Mac OS 7 would be best on that thing for sure.

spittingangels · Jun 10, 2006, 01:26 PM

Actually the best OS for any pre-G4 Mac, that gives a great balance of features, speed, and stability, and no extra inefficient code is Mac OS 8.5.1. Flies on any PowerPC 603, 603e and G3 based Mac. The minute Mac OS 8.6 came out, with all of the G4 related code, the thing got bloated and ineffient. It wasn't halfway decent again until 9.2.1, but that would be too much really for a 5500. System 7 was fast, but wasn't stable until 7.5.3. 7.6 was a nightmare.

dpaanlka · 02:20 PM

7.6 was a nightmare?

You must be joking; that goes agains essentially every member of System 7 Today's experience. We're using it every day, I'm sure you haven't touched it in years.

"All of the G4 code" in Mac OS 8.6 consisted of one extension, how is that bloated?

Clearly you're talking out of inexperience.

spittingangels · Jun 10, 2006, 11:42 PM

Actually I worked with 7.6 and it's variants for a few years. 150 Macs in two facilities - none of them got back to anything stable until 8.1 was installed on those machines. They should have all stayed on 7.5.3 until 8.1 was out. 7.6 was not as polished as it should have been. You have to understand that a machine needs to be paired with an OS that works best with it. So while, for example, 9.2.2 is a great Mac OS version, it is not the best pairing with say, a Performa 6360, where you get the best performance and stability actually with MacOS 8.5.1.

Always pair a Mac with the proper OS verison instead of just always upgrading to the latest and greatest thing.

dpaanlka · 02:12 PM

I have over 70 Macs currently and consistantly find 7.6.1 to be by far the most stable release of Mac OS 7 on all the machines I ever installed it on... and 7.5.anything to be the least stable. Every person who has contacted me through that site has also reported the same.

You're essentially the first person ever to claim to me that 7.6 is less stable than 7.5, and I've been running System 7 Today since November of last year. Dozens of people have contacted me personally, and over a hundred people have registered at the forums so far and they all say that 7.6 is great.

Perhaps you weren't optimizing or updating your systems...

dpaanlka · 03:07 PM

And your insistance that Mac OS 8.6 contains all sorts of inefficient bloated extra code for G4 systems and so therefore you should use 8.5.1 on any non-G4 is so ridiculous I don't even know how to respond to that.

...especially if all he wants to do is watch TV...

rich82fox · Jun 13, 2006, 06:50 AM

Originally Posted by BigBadBiologist

My 6400 (or was it a 6300) used the apple video player under OS8/9. There was a setting for selecting the TV tuner as your source.

thanx for your post

I just got one of these black powermacs - it had apple video player already on - and it worked fine

stupidly I formatted the hard drive and installed an italian os 9.1 - witjout apple video player

I downloaded apple video player - but now that application starts up - but when I press Auto-tune it does nothing (I have set which country I am in etc)

any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

rich

forevermac · Jun 21, 2006, 01:23 PM

make sure you have all the necessary extensions installed... should be mpeg decoder on board the powermac 5500etc. I assume you have your mpeg decoder card installed?

imitchellg5 · Jun 28, 2006, 07:16 PM

I love OS 8.6 it runs crazy fast on my PowerBook 5300cs with 40 mb of RAM and the PowerPC 603e.

P · Jun 30, 2006, 09:22 AM

Theer are actually two version of 8.6. The regular one and the one that came with the slot-loading iMacs and by rights ought to be called 8.6.1. The regular one is great. It is faster than 8.5.1 (yes, really), and you can also run the latest CarbonLib on it. 9.1 is the only worthwile release after that, when they optimized some more code for PPC and made ti even faster, but it uses even more RAM.

Similar, 7.6 wasn't all that but 7.6.1 was fast and rocksolid.

dpaanlka · Jun 30, 2006, 01:35 PM

Originally Posted by imitchellg5

I love OS 8.6 it runs crazy fast on my PowerBook 5300cs with 40 mb of RAM and the PowerPC 603e.

8.6 certainly doesn't run "crazy fast" on a 5300cs. Maybe its the fastest OS version you've used on that machine, but Mac OS 8.1 and especially Mac OS 7.6.1 run much faster.

Gossamer · Jun 30, 2006, 03:30 PM

Originally Posted by dpaanlka

8.6 certainly doesn't run "crazy fast" on a 5300cs. Maybe its the fastest OS version you've used on that machine, but Mac OS 8.1 and especially Mac OS 7.6.1 run much faster.

Agreed. 8.5 on a 1400/166 with 60 meg is RAM is intolerably slow, and the 5300 was worse running 8.0. Once you're use to using good machines, you kind of get spoiled

imitchellg5 · Jul 3, 2006, 12:30 PM

Ah well to me it seems pretty fast, way faster than our Performa. The PowerBook has 40Mb of RAM and a 1 gig HD by the way.

P · Jul 3, 2006, 04:07 PM

I suppose there is no comparing different OSes over different machines when the OS is as odd as the old Mac OS, but I definately think that 8.6 was the fastest I ever ran on the Performa 5300. It did eat more RAM than 8.1, and I never had 7.6.1 on that machine, but 8.6 was definately faster than 8.1 on everything that counted. Plus, 8.1 had a nasty habit of losing the correct file names of anything non-ASCII on an HFS+ drive if booted with extensions off. That put a BIG crimp in my problem solving sessions. 7.6.1 loses by not even supporting HFS+ - I'm sorry, but that was a showstopper in my book, even back then.

dpaanlka · Jul 3, 2006, 05:14 PM

Originally Posted by P

7.6.1 loses by not even supporting HFS+ - I'm sorry, but that was a showstopper in my book, even back then.

The teeny tiny size of 7.6.1, plus all of the other benefits on older hardware, makes it so that there is hardly a show to stop.

Not to mention, HFS+ has no effect on smaller hard drives common in such machines.

imitchellg5 · Jul 3, 2006, 06:37 PM

Originally Posted by P

I suppose there is no comparing different OSes over different machines when the OS is as odd as the old Mac OS, but I definately think that 8.6 was the fastest I ever ran on the Performa 5300. It did eat more RAM than 8.1, and I never had 7.6.1 on that machine, but 8.6 was definately faster than 8.1 on everything that counted. Plus, 8.1 had a nasty habit of losing the correct file names of anything non-ASCII on an HFS+ drive if booted with extensions off. That put a BIG crimp in my problem solving sessions. 7.6.1 loses by not even supporting HFS+ - I'm sorry, but that was a showstopper in my book, even back then.

We had a Performa 6300 with 8.6 on it and it ran pretty smoothly. Ours crashed a couple of times with 7.6.1, but ran great with 8.6.