[NormPhillips]

How fast is the DVD-ROM drive in the Power Mac G4 450DP (Gigabit Ethernet)? I would like to know both the DVD read speed and the CD read speed. Also, can a computer read DVD videos from an external drive?

[angelmb]

Hum, being a 2000 model I guess it could be something like 8x for DVDs and 32x for CDs…

About read DVD movies from an external drive, if I am not wrong, a restriction was introduced in 10.3.5 where an internal DVD drive was required to run the DVD Player, but there are some patchs out there to avoid it.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/17888

Then I guess you could use some other app like VLC Player and try to run the movies with it.

Has the DVD drive inside your G4 died?

[NormPhillips]

No, the power supply in the G4 died. I now have a brand new MacBook Pro 15.4" 2.16GHz and I'm thinking about using the G4's optical drive as an external DVD drive. However, I also have an external CD burner. So before I can decide which to use, I need to know how fast the DVD-ROM is.

[NormPhillips]

Anyone have a 450/DP or 500/DP G4? Perhaps you could check in System Profiler how fast the DVD-ROM read and CD-ROM read speeds are. Does anyone know the exact speeds?

[NormPhillips]

I found out the speed of the drive. It's 8x DVD read and 40x CD read.