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iMac G3 Internet Streaming Machine

H

helios16v

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 1, 2008
149
0
Earth
I decided to take out my old iMac G3 I picked up at a yard sale for 30 bucks. It's green, 333mhz, 256mb of ram, 128mb of vram, and a whopping 7gb hard drive:eek:

When I hooked it back up it booted with Ubuntu 4.10 on it so I formatted and installed OSX 10.2.4, it's updating to 10.2.8 right now.

I've started deleting useless apps I'll never end up using like iPhoto or iMovie etc.

My goal for this machine is to have it with a very fast boot time(for how old it is) and get it to start up the browser automatically if it can so then I can just click my favorite shows online and start playing them right away.

I was going to use Google Chrome but it requires 10.5, Mozilla Firefox requires 10.4, Internet Explorer 4.0 was outdated and there was no update for it. Safari it is unless someone can point me to a faster web browser for 10.2

I'll upload pictures of the progress once I find the charger for my camera.

Any help on applications I can delete to make it run faster or hacks I could do to make this run faster would be greatly appreciated.

-Ben
 
helios16v said:
My goal for this machine is to have it with a very fast boot time(for how old it is) and get it to start up the browser automatically if it can so then I can just click my favorite shows online and start playing them right away.
Click to expand...

Not bloody likely. Not enough horsepower.


helios16v said:
I was going to use Google Chrome but it requires 10.5, Mozilla Firefox requires 10.4, Internet Explorer 4.0 was outdated and there was no update for it. Safari it is unless someone can point me to a faster web browser for 10.2
Click to expand...

Omni Group might have older versions OmniWeb available.


helios16v said:
Any help on applications I can delete to make it run faster or hacks I could do to make this run faster would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

Deleting things like iMovie will give you zero performance boost. They don't start up unless you tell them to.

I thought I've seen blogs listing a few minor things you can do, but that was some time ago.
 
666sheep said:
Give it more RAM, faster and bigger HDD and/or you could overclock it a little (if you got soldering skills): http://sites.google.com/site/overclockmac/homepage
OS 10.2 is not perfect IMO, maybe try 10.3 with it?
Click to expand...

I don't wanna put any more money into it then I did when I bought it so RAM is out of the question, as for a bigger and faster hard drive I don't really need bigger because I don't plan on keeping any files on it so that 7gb is way more then enough space for it. I am going to read up on that over clocking link you posted because that seems right up my ally for working on this thing. and for boot time it was at 2 minutes and 39 seconds after a fresh install and once I deleted programs to free up some space the boot time was 2:33 so its 6 seconds faster, still slow as hell but it did make a slight improvement.

I think over clocking it will make the best improvement. I am having a huge problem though.

For those who are using firefox, click the "view" drop down menu at the top, go down to "page style" and in that menu click "no style". that is how safari looks on every web page on my imac and i cant figure out why its like that.

so youtube isn't working and I cant stream any videos which is the only thing I want to do on the iMac.

Any idea's on how to fix this?
 
as for autamaticly starting the browser, go into system prefrences, click on the acconts prefpane and ther will be an option to autostart programs
 
My problem with safari was because it was version 1.0 which doesn't have very good css support I think he said (my friend is a mac wizard lol).

I'm getting a copy of OSX 10.4 (Tiger) right now and thats the newest version of osx that will run on this iMac without huge problems.

Thank you for explaining how to auto start an application, I'm going to set this up when I get back and hopefully its working enough to take some successful pictures or a video of it working for what I wanted it to do.

-Ben
 
Does anyone know of any sites that have a write up on how to connect an external display to the iMac G3? or possibly some way to install this into an old pc case so I have more room to work with for fans and other cooling products for when I over clock this to 533MHz.

I want to rig up an old Intel P4 heat sink I have sitting around to cool the over clocked G3 processor. Making it all fit and work properly in an old PC case will be the easy part, I just don't know how to hook up a different display or at least a second display so this will work on my 24" LCD

-Ben
 
For one thing, your iMac has 6 MB VRAM, not 128 MB as stated in the first post.

Also, I wouldn't even try to make this happen. A G3 is not anywhere close to fast enough. My 1.5 GHz PBG4 w/ 2 GB RAM really struggles with Flash, and it's much, much faster than a 333 MHz iMac G3. There's no way you're going to get your iMac to do what you're wanting it to. I hope I don't sound rude, I'm just saying it like it is. The machine is so outdated that you're going to have trouble doing anything media-related. Adding 200 MHz isn't going to make much of a difference.

The iMac doesn't have, IIRC, a normal way to hook it up to an external monitor. If you can get a DB-15 to VGA adaptor you could theoretically use the internal screen connection. But the graphics card is going to have a very hard time pushing the native resolution of a 24" monitor.

I admire the amount of work you're willing to put in to make this work. The machine is just too old to do what you want to (like trying to race a Model-T). If you want to do something with it, I'd just set it up as an in-home server.
 
ok more problems lol (what else is new?) tried installing 10.4 and turns out I'm an idiot and didn't bother the check that my iMac does NOT have firewire so 10.3 is the one I'm going with now haha

Even if this thing doesn't work then it was a fun week long project to keep me busy so I'm having fun messing around with it and if I do end up getting some use out of it then its doing a lot more then I had it doing just sitting there collecting dust.

If all fails then I can always put Linux back on it and give gnash another shot at streaming video. I was reading up on making a build of Google Chromium OS for Power PC and it turns out you CAN make it happen if you have a copy of Linux for a Power PC. Theres a lot of work needed to make the distro correctly and it all seems way over my head for my Linux knowledge so I don't think I'll let this project go that far but I'm just putting that out there that Chromium OS will run on a G3 iMac with some work which is super slim and runs stupid fast.

I googled some iMac to PC case tutorials and they seem like TONS of work, lots of soldering too so unless this project works then putting it into a PC case will be my next upcoming project.

-Ben
 
I really don't think you'll be able to do what you want with your iMac, to be frank. I'm on my 600Mhz Snow with Shadowkiller installed, Spotlight disabled, and Dashboard disabled for speed, and video streaming is still a no-go. You may be able to watch older, lower quality videos, but they will still be quite choppy. If I were you, I'd just use it for iTunes or as a back up machine, like others have mentioned. I really don't wish to break your spirit, but it's the truth.
Even if it doesn't work, just have fun doing it ;)
 
333mhz is the max clock frequency that is supported. You might be able to push it to 350 or 366mhz, but not more than that. Certainly not to 500+ mhz!
It will be fast enough if you want to steam simple mp3's using itunes, but not flash related mp3's through the browser.
 
Update:
Installed Mozilla Firefox 2.0 (the highest that will run on OSX 10.2.8) but I've run into another problem now.

Youtube loads fine and all is well again with browsing, now the problem being the flash player. Before a video will play it tells me I need to update the flash player, so I clicked the link and it brings me to the Adobe site and there is a drop down window that asks if I want Adobe flash 9 (for osx 10.1 to 10.3) or Adobe flash 10 (for osx 10.4+) so naturally I clicked Adobe flash 9, the page loads and I click download and install. opened the DMG file and a window pops up, I dragged and dropped the 2 files to where they go and restarted Firefox but then Youtube still tells me the flash player is out of date?!?

What should I do?
I'm going to try a full system restart right now and if that doesn't work then I'm out of idea's
(This post was made on the iMac G3 :D)

-Ben
 
Sign up to YouTube's HTML5 Beta. Most of the videos will be displayed in HTML5, which is very mac friendly, and as far as I know, you don't need to download anything to use it :D

I'm using the HTML5 Beta on my MacBook Pro, and it doesn't make my computer heat up or anything like flash did.

Good luck with that bro!
 
That actually won't work. HTML5 beta on YT requires a browser that can do HTML5. FireFox 2 can't do HTML5. You'd need the current version of Safari or Chrome, neither of which will run on the iMac, to view it. Even if you did set it up, most videos are encoded H.264, which is difficult enough for a G4 with plenty of RAM to play back smoothly, impossible for a G3 with limited RAM.

I'm very interested to see how far this project gets. I've said it before, it's never going to happen, but I admire helios' determination and wonder how far he/she will get...
 
iThinkergoiMac said:
That actually won't work. HTML5 beta on YT requires a browser that can do HTML5. FireFox 2 can't do HTML5. You'd need the current version of Safari or Chrome, neither of which will run on the iMac, to view it. Even if you did set it up, most videos are encoded H.264, which is difficult enough for a G4 with plenty of RAM to play back smoothly, impossible for a G3 with limited RAM.

I'm very interested to see how far this project gets. I've said it before, it's never going to happen, but I admire helios' determination and wonder how far he/she will get...
Click to expand...

Ok, so HTML5 and Flash player 9 and 10 are ruled out. How about trying flash player 8 (if you can still download it)?
 
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