[gordontowne]

I've got an G4 Powerbook that I would like to turn into a media center computer. I've been looking at some storage, and have found some pretty cheap 500GB USB drives, and was wondering whether these should be sufficient for running video off of, or if I should shell out some extra money for a firewire interface.

Thanks!

[mduell]

USB2 at ~25MBps is more than fast enough for playing video, even if you're recording at the same time.

[besson3c]

Are you willing to basically give up on having your Powerbook be portable? If not, perhaps it would be better to build a cheap PC and attach some SATA disks to it?

[SEkker]

I have a G4 PB with a defective screen I'm installing Leopard on as I type this to try out as a potential media center machine.

I have already tried using a G4 Mac Mini, with mixed results. Using a USB2 hard drive, the files really skipped a lot during playback. When I went to a firewire drive, this was much better - but not nearly as good as using a modern mactel laptop (just to test). I checked, and the handbrake-generated files are fine.

I was thinking the PBG4 might be ok because it has core image support. I'll post an update as things progress.