Will my G3 B&W (no upgraded CPU) work with a DVD burner?

[Nudist]

I have a 350 and am considering a Pioneer 105 DVD-R Firewire burner. Will it work and what things should I be aware of when I install it?

 

[jMc]

Well, it may well work... but bear in mind it will take the good part of a weekend to burn a DVD with such an old machine... G4s are generally recommedned for DVD burning...

jx

 

[iGav]

Originally posted by jMc
Well, it may well work... but bear in mind it will take the good part of a weekend to burn a DVD with such an old machine... G4s are generally recommedned for DVD burning...

jx

The G4 shouldn't really have any reflection on the burn speed of the DVD drive...

The G4 is recommended by iMovie etc to encode MPEG 2 faster, although you can obviously encode MPEG 2 DV by other means, such as Cleaner etc with no worries at all so a G4 isn't necessarily required to encode MPEG 2, it'll just do it much faster.

As long as your G3 is running the latest version of OSX with any firmware updates etc installed, and you've followed the instructions I wouldn't have thought they'd be a problem.

Although it's my understanding that iMovie/iDVD can be funny with 3rd party DVD burners, so maybe check that out, I can't be more specific because I don't use iMovie or iDVD... Or look into getting Toast Titanium if it's going to be a problem.

 

[hvfsl]

You can get software patches that let you use other DVD writers with iDVD. I would expect a 1 hour video to take about 40hours to save in DVD format. You could also upgrade the CPU, there are very fast G3 and G4 upgrades now avaliable.

 

[pseudobrit]

The G3 simply cannot handle the amount of raw data that needs to be encoded like the Velocity engine can.

For all intents and purposes, you need a G4 to burn DVDs. I wouldn't even bother trying with a G3.

 

[macphoria]

You can get software patches that let you use other DVD writers with iDVD. I would expect a 1 hour video to take about 40hours to save in DVD format. You could also upgrade the CPU, there are very fast G3 and G4 upgrades now avaliable.

I hear this is part of reason why G3 iBook will not come out with SuperDrive.

 

[Nudist]

One more detaiil. . .

I am mainly instalilng the burner to backup some data on my computer. I am working on a book and have about 1Gb of photos and an Indesign file. Will it still take 40 hours to burn straight data to a DVD?

 

[macphoria]

That "40 hours" comment referred to how long it would take for G3 processor to encode movies for burning onto a DVD, not how long it would take to burn information onto a DVD.

I would imagine the time required to burn data onto a DVD depends on how fast the DVD drive is.

 

[iGav]

Re: One more detaiil. . .

Originally posted by Nudist
I am mainly instalilng the burner to backup some data on my computer. I am working on a book and have about 1Gb of photos and an Indesign file. Will it still take 40 hours to burn straight data to a DVD?

No where near, (by a good 39 hours atleast) the amount of time it'll take to burn depends on how fast your burner is... that's it! Oh and any time it takes to copy and for Toast to cache your files! We're only talking 4.3GB for a DVD if you fill it! that is not alot of data, even for a G3!!

Believe it or not, DVD authoring was happening before the G4 was released, I used to do DVD Authoring on G3's and PC's/Sonic in the late 90's as well as encoding MPEG 2 video, and the G3 handled it with no problems at all!!

As long as you get the hardware working okay (which I really doubt will be a problem) you'll be fine doing what you need to do with your G3...