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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (35233)	8/17/1998 4:48:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

E4/Apple DVD-ROM review. E4 is the only one making a DVD-decoder card for Macs...................................... I looked at the first complete DVD-ROM kit for the Mac, the CoolDVD Mac SCSI Upgrade Kit ($479) from Elecede Technologies (aka E4). The kit includes a Pioneer DVD UO2 internal SCSI drive and E4's own CoolDVD Mac DVD Play Back Card, a DVD-Video decoder on a PCI card. (E4 sells a similar upgrade that includes a Panasonic EIDE DVD-ROM drive for Power Mac G3 systems.) I installed the SCSI kit in a three-year-old Power Mac 7500 and it performed flawlessly. DVD-izing Your Mac To operate a DVD-ROM drive with your Mac, you need a 68040- or PowerPC-based machine and Mac OS 8.1, which includes the necessary software: the Apple CD/DVD (SCSI) or Apple DVD-ROM (EIDE) driver; the UDF Volume Access extension (which allows the Mac to read the DVD disc format); and new versions of Foreign File Access, Audio CD, High Sierra, and ISO 9660 Access. The CoolDVD kit also comes with software that allows you to use Mac OS 7.6. In order to play DVD-Video, you'll also need a DVD-Video decoder card, which requires a Power Mac with a PCI slot. E4's CoolDVD is currently the only package that includes everything for PCI Power Macs. In fact, E4 is the only company making a decoder card for the Mac. Since a DVD-ROM drive can do everything your CD-ROM can do and more, you'll probably want to simply replace your CD-ROM drive. But if you have a second, empty 5.25-inch drive bay (which means you've probably got a minitower system), you could install a DVD-ROM drive alongside your internal CD-ROM. There's just one hitch: Because the Mac's motherboard has only one audio input connector, you'll need to buy an audio Y-cable (Radio Shack, $5) to hook up--and get sound from--both the DVD and CD-ROM drives. You can buy drives made by a number of manufacturers, including Sony, Panasonic, and Pioneer, for about $200 to $250. If you're buying a new Power Macintosh G3, you can order the machine with a DVD-ROM drive for an extra $130. But in both cases, you won't get a DVD-Video decoder board. To play DVD movies on your DVD-ROM-equipped Power Mac G3, you'll have to buy a decoder card from E4, which sells the CoolDVD Mac DVD Play Back Card for $279. Apple's DVD-Video Kit for late-model PowerBook G3s comes with a drive and a DVD-Video decoder card, which fits in the notebook's PC Card slot. Note: At press time, Apple announced the DVD Video and Audio/Video decoder card option with Power Mac G3 systems. -Editor More............................ currents.net