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Can I play DVDs on an external drive hooked up to my G3 iMac?

I have a Snow iMac G3 800MHz, with both OS9.2.2 and OS10.1.5 on it, and for jollies, I put 10.3 on my external firewire hard drive, and just boot off the external drive. I wanted to see how well that works, and it works wonderfully. (it is up to 10.3.7 right now)

Anyway, this is my question: I've been itching to buy an external firewire DVD drive, to play movies or anything else a DVD drive can be used for. I've tried to figure out if this is possible, and whether I would run into problems concerning encoding or decoding movies, software vs hardware decoding, which external DVD drives have the decoding ability built in, and... I'm not sure what else to think.

So I was wondering what your thoughts are and how to tell if external DVD drives have hardware decoding built into them, or if I could just buy any ol' external DVD drive as long as I had the proper software.

Dave's Answer:

Here's the good news: as far as I am aware, you should have zero problems hooking up an external DVD drive to watch movies, etc. For a computer, a DVD is just a big datastream, and we know that Mac OS X already has a great DVD player application, DVD Player, that knows how to read that data.

Frankly, if that doesn't work, I have found that VLC Media Player does a great job with just about any video material you give it, from DivX to QT streams to DVDs. Even better, VLC is open source and free, so its worth downloading and trying even if just as an experiment!

The biggest problem I can envision you having with the external DVD drive is when you try to burn DVDs of your own. I don't know which external drive you're considering but I do recall that Mac OS X has in the past had some complaints about writing to external (or even non-Apple internal) DVD burners.

If that's a problem, I wouldn't be surprised to find that Roxio's great application Toast Titanium (about $60 at Amazon) would let you sidestep that problem. And DVD disks make excellent backup devices, by the way!

So the long and short of it is that you should have no problems with an external DVD drive hooked up to your Snow iMac. Definitely, definitely, though, you want to get one that connects through Firewire, not USB: your system doesn't have Firewire 800 or USB 2.0, so Firewire 400 is your fastest option.

Good luck and let us know what movie you watch first!

Note: while I haven't heard any reports of iMacs being unable to view DVDs, I have heard from some people that they can't get their old iBook G3's to work with external DVD players. If you have an iBook, please test it with the external drive before you purchase something without a refund policy, and good luck.

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Comments

Hello folks-
I hooked up an external dvd drive (fw) to my mac with that result:

1. the dvd player application has been erased from my system-
can�t find it anywhere.

2. A bought movie dvd isn�t even shown on my desktop/finder.

Conclusion : At that time ( I stated yesterday ) there�s no way for me to watch any dvds on my os 10.3.9 neither with dvd player nor with the vlc.
That sucks!

I would recommend no one to try this.
Bye
folks
Pater

Posted by: Pater at November 27, 2005 4:37 PM

That's very strange that "DVD Player" has vanished from your computer. Have you tried running Spotlight or Sherlock to see if it's just in a location you're not expecting? When you put a regular CDROM in your new external DVDROM drive, does the computer see it? When you put the DVD movie into someone else's computer, does the computer see it? I have some sporadic problems with certain DVDs on my G5 Mac...

Finally, it might be worth checking out the very latest release of VLC - it was just updated this weekend - to see if it helps (though if you aren't seeing the DVD on your desktop then you're basically out of luck unless you have a driver solution. I'd contact the manufacturer of the external DVD for advice)

VLC can be found at http://www.videolan.org/

Posted by: Dave Taylor at November 28, 2005 4:23 AM

My daughter's DVD drive, that I got her for her birthday, was not being seen by her iMac. That is, it would see the discs as data containers, but not run the movies. One sad teenager.

After reading your advice (found with Google), I downloaded the VLC program and installed it (dragged it in...) and she's now happily watching a movie on her computer.

Thank you!

Posted by: George at January 21, 2007 1:40 PM

BTW, Apple's DVD player apparently DOES NOT recognize external DVD drives. Nor will Finder burn to external drives.

Maybe driven by marketing, but not the most helpful decision they've ever made...

George

Posted by: George at January 21, 2007 1:43 PM

same problem as george's sad teenager. tried vlc and will be watching a dvd soon! well um except my lap top looks like it may not be able to handle it...

Posted by: alex at February 22, 2007 6:55 PM

A few points:

1) DVD Player is only installed on computers with an internal Apple DVD device when installing the system. I don't think you erased it -- it probably wasn't there to begin with!

2) DVD Player won't work with an external or non-Apple internal DVD device. (Article ID: 42727)

3) Try as I might, I could not find a separate install of the Apple DVD Player application. It wouldn't have worked anyway as per the above.

Hope this helps. I would love to find a hack for this as DVD Player is nicer than VLC.

Posted by: charlieparisek at March 16, 2007 9:59 PM

What's all this about DVD's not playing in external DVd player. I just installed a Sony DRU-830A with a USB 2.0 connection to my iMac 20 (Tiger) and I am now watching "Midnight in the garden of Good and Evil". Works fine here.

I cannot seem to write to this external dvd/cd device though.

Posted by: Hap at May 17, 2007 7:03 PM

I have an iMac G3 without a DVD drive. I want to upgrade to OSX.4 but the install discis a DVD. Would an external dvd drive solve my problem? If not, would there be any other way of upgrading my system?

Matt Thomas

Posted by: Matthew Thomas at June 3, 2007 7:37 AM

I have an imac G3 700SE with only a cd slot dive but for the last 2 years have been running a firewire external dvd drive using VLC and burning using Toast 6 and Burn. Altho I would love a newer mac with a superdive and access to idvd, I manage to get round and "mass produce" DVD's for a Theatre Group. My latest dvd drive is "lightscibe" but because its being run through a mac, all the lightscibe facilities are not available but cd/dvd labels can be made using Discus. I have never tried it on USB 1.1 but I guess that it would be far to slow.....at present it can burn a DVD in 7 mins. Not bad eh, but a newer mac is on the wish list. If anyone want to question me I am on geofcoulson@netscpae.net

Geoff Coulson

Posted by: Geoff Coulson at November 25, 2007 1:54 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!