[iKevin]

Am I doing something wrong? I just got a iMac 500 w/DVD from the Apple store and the DVD playback is horrible. Any little thing causes the playback to lag. Example: I am watching a DVD movie and click on anything, even as little as just highlighting a desktop icon, and the DVD movie will freeze for just a second. I have disabled VM and have given the DVD player more RAM...nothing seems to help. If i have the movie playing full screen and bring up the DVD controller...whew, lag city!

Any ideas on how to fix this? Or is this the reason apple dumped DVD for the CDRW drives?

Here are the system specs:

iMac 500/Snow Firewire
DVD
640mb 2-2-2 RAM
30gb hard drive

[Leonard]

Yes, that's pretty much how the DVD runs, you cannot and should not do anything while running it. As you mentioned already, VM should be off, and you should allocate more RAM to the application. You have to remember, that DVD decoding is putting a heavy load on the CPU (in my opinion, especially if you have a G3 CPU).

Apple did not dump DVD, they have two drives that support DVD, the combo drive and the superdrive. They just realized that they were way ahead of the rest of the crowd with DVD and backed up a step to provide DVD and CDRW support.

[iKevin]

Originally posted by Leonard:
<STRONG>Yes, that's pretty much how the DVD runs, you cannot and should not do anything while running it. As you mentioned already, VM should be off, and you should allocate more RAM to the application. You have to remember, that DVD decoding is putting a heavy load on the CPU (in my opinion, especially if you have a G3 CPU).

Apple did not dump DVD, they have two drives that support DVD, the combo drive and the superdrive. They just realized that they were way ahead of the rest of the crowd with DVD and backed up a step to provide DVD and CDRW support.</STRONG>

That sucks....i love Mac's but PC's run DVD waaay better

[McNugget]

Yes, probably, but that's because PC's use the extra hardware decoder video chipset....and the iMac is pure software starting from the iMac DV (1999) and the G4...
I bet you would have an even worse time trying software decoding on a PC...

[kovacs]

It's not only the iMac that has this problem, I have both an iMac 500 and an G4 450 DP and they all show this behavior. I can live with a little lag but I can't live with black that looks like grey and other dark colors that also look like grey.

I hope OS 10.1 improves things for us...

[gto47]

I've had the same problem. Mcnugget is on the money. Imacs use sofware decoders rather than hardware ones. You don't notice it much though as long as you're not multi tasking. Switching to thousands of colors might take some of the load off of the graphics card. I've tried doing this and it works a little, depending on what else you're trying to do. OSX .1 aint gonna make things better on the imacs, but at least we'll finally have dvd support. Turning VM off like you said, but i personally never bothered with it. That stupid dvd controller is really a pain in the ass too, like you said it always lags. A better graphics card would help it some, but it's not really an option in the imac. You've probably got 16 megs of vram in that thing anyways though, so you wouldn't be able to do much better. The only advice i can give you is to live with it. I know it's a pain in the ass, but there's nothing to be done.

[McNugget]

Yes, that's right, there is no way out of the predicament...unless you downgraded to a G3 Blue and White...those ones have a hardware decoder...but the top speed on those was 400 mhz and the videocard was also a PCI ATI Rage 128 w/8 MB RAM...
I think you're better off with those iMacs...I myself have an iMac DV 1999 (w/8 VRAM instead of your 16 VRAM) and although I acknowledge the limitations on DVD playback, I'm satisfied.
About DVD on OSX, I think the software engineers have to pull something really ingenious to prevent DVD video from lagging at all even with ou multitasking...