[Klaatu]

As per the advice of MacDoc I bought the Pioneer A05 (one of the last remaining at the local Future Shop) instead of the more current A06. I missed the sale earlier this week but I still managed to get a 10% discount from the current $299 price (full retail box). Plus, just in case it worked, I bought a bunch of Memorex dvds (5-pack for $9.99).

Installation was straight-forward. Using advice from xlr8yourmac.com I set it to Master, installed on its own ide chain and, by golly, it's recognized in both Jaguar and OS 9. The system profiler shows it as "fully supported" and that it's Revision 1.30 (some reported problems with earlier versions)

However, I had two problems that I spent the evening solving:

1) Could not install DVD Player (OS X version). Warning said it could not install on my particular machine. I think this is what MacDoc was warning about but xlr8yourmac had a nifty solution. And, I'll be damned, it worked!

2) Made a couple of toasters. "Sense key" errors or some such thing happened. Burns quit after a few minutes. I did some searching on the net but couldn't locate a solution. Finally I decided to check my Toast preferences and realized I had about 1GB free on the partition I was using as a Disk Cache. So I changed that to a partition with about 10GB, plus adjusted the RAM cache and... perfect burn.

I just made my first dvd and it looks gorgeous.

I'm now having second thoughts about upgrading to a G4, which I've been pondering all summer. Sure, I could use increased speed, especially for all the rendering I do in iMovie, but as I do this for fun, not profit -- hence no deadlines to worry about -- I think I'll hold out a bit longer.

I've never been the type who felt compelled to get the latest/greatest toy and -- especially right now -- I'm proud that an increasingly devalued machine like the beige G3 can still rock

 

[Fox]

Glad to hear your DVD is working on a beige, Klaatu. I bought one of those units myself last week (caught the sale), installed it in a QuickSilver, but have yet to test it on a DVD burn. Your details will probably help me. By the way, I have a beige in my lab, and was thinking that I would eventually move the Pioneer to it if and when I replace my QS with a G5. Now I know it will work flawlessly!

Now if I can only find a cheap video upgrade card for the beige.

 

[MacDoc]

That's good news - beiges were always iffy on DVD and Apple goes with sort of "they never existed" scenario.

Michae,l Rage 128s from Blues work well - 7000s Radeons are iffy but there are patches around. The 32 meg Radeon Mac edition is excellent but hard to find.
On a 17" the 6 meg on board is decent - the 2 meg is shall we say lacking

BTW we have 105s in stock.

 

[Klaatu]

Your details will probably help me...

Then let me add one more bit of info... I made one more coaster and figured out the problem; don't use the top advertised speed of the media you use, especially when burning video (2x for 4x media, 1x for 2x media). Buffer underrun protection doesn't seem to help.

 

[MacDoc]

KLaatu will you write up a small Step by Step for the beige DVD project and I'll post it on our web site.
Some suitable reward in order

Lookup your revision in the System profiler and which graphic chip you have on the MB thanks

 

[Klaatu]

Kind offer MacDoc but I gather the trick is having an A05 with the latest firmware (1.30 or 1.33). Most of the models left on the shelves have this already. Mine has a manufacture date of March 2003 (1.30). Those who had problems before likely had earlier models and the firmware could only be flashed with a pc. Besides that the installation is no different than a cd-writer. Pretty much the way it's described above. Then, of course, is having a video card (well worth the investment anyway) and the DVD Player installation trick from xlr8yourmac.com.

The only remaining mystery is how the A06 works. It'll very soon be difficult to find an A05. Might be good to snatch up the ones MacDoc has in stock. Some reports suggest they have problems with the A06 because Apple software doesn't support DVD+R media -- even when using DVD-R media. But some of the published system requirements for the A06 say the G3 is supported. Who knows. Hopefully others can post their experience with this model.

 

[MacDoc]

We can flash with a pc anyway. Still interested in your profiler cuz our experience with beiges and DVD units has been frustrating.

There is no advantage to the a06 and they are not cheap.

 

[monokitty]

Still interested in your profiler cuz our experience with beiges and DVD units has been frustrating.

I don't understand this. DVD-playback is a plug n' play setup on any Beige G3. Have a Rage 128 or better video card and your good to go. Getting DVD-playback working on my Beige G3 desktop was a brainless procedure.