G3 B&W with dvd?

[d_saum]

Hey all,

Im using a G3 B&W 350 Mhz system in my living room as a media center and so far its been great. What I'd like to know is if I can install a dvd drive in it with it being only 350Mhz? I remember something about the G3 chips and dvd apps not working together so well but Im not sure if that was in regard to apps like iDVD and/or DVD Player.

Also, I've downloaded Handbrake and want to start ripping movies to the Hard drive, but which format should I choose? Its going to be on a standard def tv, so 640 x 480 should be good enough. Thanks!

Dave

 

[Lord Blackadder]

Plenty of options, and they're all quite cheap these days (I paid over $120 for a DVD-RW a couple years back, a DVR-107D).

I'd use Mac the Ripper and Toast to rip and burn movies - I held off on Toast for the longest time but I finally broke down because I wanted to back up most of my DVDs and it simplifies things tremendously.

 

[d_saum]

Cool, well that answers my question about the G3 using a dvd drive. Thanks for the toast recommendation but I'm more interested in ripping the movies to the HDD rather than backing them up to another dvd.

Any other ideas for old faithful will be greatly appreciated!

 

[jtown]

Just because you can install A DVD drive in the machine doesn't mean it will be able to do all of the things you want. A 350Mhz G3 is gonna take a long time to rip DVDs if you're converting them to another format. It also may not be capable of playing them back smoothly, depending on the encoding method you use.

Do you plan to use the DVD drive to play DVDs on the G3? What format are you going to use for ripped DVDs? (divx, quicktime, xvid, etc.) Let people know exactly what you want to accomplish and then they can tell you if the 350Mhz G3 will be able to do it.

For reference, my old 800 Mhz G3 ibook was barely able to play back some DVDs I'd ripped and encoded in divx format. I think they were 480 lines. Maybe less. I had to make sure nothing else was running and it would still stutter from time to time. No way would I expect high quality divx clips to play on a G3 running at less than half the speed.

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

yep you can install a DVD drive into a B&W, been there, done that notta problemo....that will allow you to also install iDVD & DVD player too

As for which format you choose for the ripping, that would largely depend on how much HD space you have available.....video takes up ALOT, so if you have a smallish HD, use the format that produces the smallest file sizes, or if you have gobs of space, use the format that gives you the best quality

 

[dpaanlka]

A lot of them came with DVD drives. Their original Rage cards had an expansion port into which you would add a DVD decoder card. Playing the DVDs had nothing to do with the processor - it was all handled by the video card.

 

[d-fi]

If you have another computer i would sugest that you try encoding some video clips and try them on your G3 before you rush out and purchase a DVD drive. Even if you have to burn the files to a CD to move them over to the "media mac"

I have a G3 300mHz B/W powermac i it can just bairly play DivX/Xvid, and that was if i set the screen resolution at 640x480 and turn EVERYTHING else off. I did a DVD rip with my other computer transfered the files to my B/W mac and it could play the DVD image using software decoding (was using VLC to play it) but it wasn't watchable.

If you put a DVD drive in your mac it should be fine playing DVD's since the drive does most work. But if you want to import and encode to Xvid (or other codecs) you'll need to play around with settings to find out what will work for your computer, might take awhile to find what works.

just some friendly advice