Hi, I have an older bleuberry ibook. I think it's 233 speed and 128 ram. I got an 80 gb harddrive. i wanna buy an external burner to watch dvds on? Is this possible with the slowness and oldness of my computer, through usb cables??
help
andy
i need an external dvd drive/cd burner for my slow blueberry ibook
May 22, 2005 - 12:31am
#1
i need an external dvd drive/cd burner for my slow blueberry ibook
You've only got USB 1.1 on there. WAY too slow for anything beyond simple file storage. Even using a CD-ROM over USB 1.1 is slow. No chance a DVD will play over it, even if the machine was fast enough. You might be able to make VCDs with another machine and watch those on it, but that would be alot of work unless this is your only portable option.
i have a burner/dvd-rom drive connected to my lombard wich is also usb 1.1, 300mhz and it burns at 4x. dvd playback isnt the hottest but it does work.
That is 4x CD-ROM speed, not 4x DVD-ROM to clarify for others. It'll probably read up to 6x CD on USB 1.1. DVD 1x == CD 9x so that means that at 6x you are only getting 2/3 of regular 1x DVD speed on USB 1.1. That'll cause choppiness and loss of data esp. if your CPU is slow.
i said that it BURNS at 4x not reads. it reads at like 12x min or something like that.
what about just getting a cd burner??? If i just wanna burn cds???
Over USB 1, a cd drive will both read and write at about 5.8-6.2X max.
Are you _sure_ that your iBook doesn`t have Firewire? If it does,
that makes all the difference.
If you're able to play choppy but watchable dvd on a slower Lombard I'd love to try to do the same. What model cdrw/dvd are you using externally, and what software decoder for playback under OS X/
Thanks
when i had my clamshell, I got an Iomega Zip CD 650 USB 1.1 Burner. It worked OK... But it is still the best thing for the job. It did 4x4x8 and it was strugling to keep up with the 4x. I think that was the CPU though. I couldn't touch it when it was burning. the Zip CD was recognized by the finder, so it was drag and drop drive, then hit "burn". Anyway, It is probably your best bet.
If anyone is wondering, I have tried a DVD drive on an iMac DV 400, using the onboard USB 1.1 and Videolan client for kicks, It paused every few seconds to try to catch up. It was too laggy for it to work at what would be an acceptable lag. if you were to use a dvd burner on the iBook, you might as well scratch the dvd-r's before putting them into the tray. It will do nothing but bad burns. the ibook just can't keep up with the buffer
Definatly not at that speed of CPU. I believe that the iBooks didn't have FW till the 366-466MHz Model
if your running OSX you should be able to extract DVD player from the install CD for 10.3 and install that which tricks OS X into thinking you have an onboard DVD drive. However, this i've only tried with a G3 iMac 500 and a G3 266 MT, both using an external FW DVD drive.
so wether this is of any use to a clamshell iBook, i'm not so sure... but if you have a later FW model then you should be ok.
using VLC enabled me to watch DVD's from the external DVD drive, but the video was choppy as hell. i looked into buying an internal DVD rom to counter this until i found out about the above...which was FREE...
if you can get the Video_TS folder onto your iBook (ethernet...?) you can watch the film from there in VLC no probs, you might have to tweak its settings though. I also did this on the G3 MT.
not sure if i've helped, but good luck!