[MacNZ]

Hi,

I'm doing the big clean up at home, selling off some old mac parts (my dead Pismo PowerBook amongst other bits) and wanting to have some fun reclaiming an old Rev. B iMac. Note, I am not too concerned about dollars or performance here, I just want to see if I can make this work, not fly. The Rev. B is maxed out with 512MB RAM and a 40GB Hard drive. I have a VERY cheap offer on a Harmoni G3/500 and Firewire upgrade card, which I will probably go for. I have a 'spare' DVD drive from the dead Pismo and I am running Panther (albeit very slowly) on the iMac. Is it worth trying to get this DVD drive working on the iMac and will it take much work? I presume I just need to take out some screws on the Pismo drive and remove the expansion bay plastics!? Also, since I am running OSX the drive should be recognised and run properly on the iMac? I know that it will not run in OS9, because the drive needs a hardware decoder in the classic environment. OS X should be sweet though?

[darwin23]

I'm thinking that the Rev.B iMac has a Rage Pro GPU.

So, you can not use Apple's DVD Player App with it.(Rage128 or better needed)

VLC or Xine under OS X should work for DVD Playback, however you'll want that G3/500 as you'll be decoding the MPEG2 in software and need all the mHz you can get.

[powertrippin]

Darwin is right. The original iMacs can't decode DVD because of the videocard, which stinks. That said, I had a 600mhz Harmoni and 512 megs ram with a 120 gig HD and it was a great little machine. Still have it, in fact, just not using it. It runs OSX quite nicely if you can put up with the CRT.

[MacNZ]

Thanks a lot for the replies. I think I may get the Harmoni upgrade in there and then give the DVD a go with VLC - I used VLC on another system and was pretty happy with it. The machine is mainly an e-mail/office station for my grandparents but in upgrading it I was trying to also learn a bit more about hardware. The perfect mini project! Thanks again.

[powertrippin]

They're good machines. I just sorta outgrew it with video editing requirements.

[waffffffle]

I got the CD-ROM from a bondi iMac to work in my Pismo. So the DVD drive itself should function, but not the DVD Player app.