Are all DVD-R/Blu-Ray drives compatible with Powermacs?

[princealfie]

I was looking around at CompUSA and noted all of the drives for discs possible. I saw the Sony Blu-Ray and a Memorex/Sony/LG DVD Superdrive and was wondering that if the box says that they are only PC, does that mean that they aren't compatible with Mac?

Also can these drives be reflashed for use on a Mac? I would be very interested in sticking the Blu-Ray Sony drive on my G3.

 

[crazycat]

I am not sure if they would work on a mac but i am pretty sure they would if you running bootcamp. I ordred a LaCie external Blu-Ray DVD writter and cant wait for it to get here.

 

[aj98]

I was looking around at CompUSA and noted all of the drives for discs possible. I saw the Sony Blu-Ray and a Memorex/Sony/LG DVD Superdrive and was wondering that if the box says that they are only PC, does that mean that they aren't compatible with Mac?

Also can these drives be reflashed for use on a Mac? I would be very interested in sticking the Blu-Ray Sony drive on my G3.

That means any included software is Windows only.

That said, it does not mean OS X (DVD player, iDVD, Toast, etc) won't see it and/or work correctly.

xlr8yourmac has a drive compatibility database, where you can check for issues with (many different) brands.

Personally, I don't think a G3 has neither the processing or video horsepower to decode blue-ray (or any HD source) without jerky video.

1080HD QT.mov (downloaded from QT movie trailers site) were essentially unplayable on my single G4/867 - Audio was clean, but the video track was a series of stills about 30 seconds apart, and way behind the audio. It would play 720p video cleanly.

 

[princealfie]

I plan to upgrade the video card majorly on my G3 (either ATI 9200 or Nvidia FX5200 reflash) so at least I get 128MB for Blu-Ray playback.

I think that Blu-Ray doesn't need high level of processing. But most importantly I can burn Blu-Ray backups on my B and W that would be cool!

 

[MRU]

Remember to playback either BluRay or HD-DVD movies on your computer your graphics card HAS to support HDCP on its DVI port and your monitor HAS to support HDCP too....

That's going to rule out a lot of exisiting powermacs and ACD's.

 

[Multimedia]

High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection

Remember to playback either BluRay or HD-DVD movies on your computer your graphics card HAS to support HDCP on its DVI port and your monitor HAS to support HDCP too....

That's going to rule out a lot of exisiting powermacs and ACD's.

What is HDCP?

It's High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection

 

[LethalWolfe]

I plan to upgrade the video card majorly on my G3 (either ATI 9200 or Nvidia FX5200 reflash) so at least I get 128MB for Blu-Ray playback.

I think that Blu-Ray doesn't need high level of processing. But most importantly I can burn Blu-Ray backups on my B and W that would be cool!

As far as movie playing goes I would be surprised if your G3 could do it. Back when DVDs were new computers couldn't play them back w/o some sort of hardware assist and a similar thing is going to happen w/HiDef DVDs as well. H.264 is one of the HiDef DVD codecs (MPEG2 and VC-1 are the other two) so I'd hazard a guess that if your computer can't play back the HD trailers on apple.com that it won't playback a HiDef disc.

Remember to playback either BluRay or HD-DVD movies on your computer your graphics card HAS to support HDCP on its DVI port and your monitor HAS to support HDCP too....

That's going to rule out a lot of exisiting powermacs and ACD's.

It's pretty much going to rule out every existing Mac. I don't even think there are any HDCP compliant video cards out yet for the Mac (and maybe only a couple for the PC if any at all). Plus the player has to be HDCP compliant as well. Basically anything involved w/playing back and/or displaying the movie has to be HDCP compliant.

Lethal

 

[ronni3]

Remember to playback either BluRay or HD-DVD movies on your computer your graphics card HAS to support HDCP on its DVI port and your monitor HAS to support HDCP too....

That's going to rule out a lot of exisiting powermacs and ACD's.

You could always use Slysoft's AnyDVD HD. It may be banned here in the States, but I'm pretty sure there are other ways of getting this piece of software. It WILL allow you to play your Blue-Ray or HD-DVD videos by bypassing the HDCP token encryption, meaning all systems will be capable of playing the video.