[X-HW] iMac, OSX, and DVD-ROM drives

[Kevin Stevens]

On Mon, 6 Jan 2003, Wally Dixon wrote:

> I have a couple of late-model 600MHz snow iMacs and have put a Matsushita
> DVD-ROM drive into one of them, only to find out after some searching that
> there *seems* to be no way of playing DVDs on the iMac under OSX.  From what
> I've read, licensing restrictions prevent DVD Player from being installed
> on machines w/o DVD drives, or something like that.  However, it works just
> fine under OS 9.2, which of course isn't ideal.
>
> Has anyone successfully installed a DVD drive into an iMac and determined
> how to play DVDs under OSX?  I don't want to, but my gut reaction is that
> I'd have to do a complete reinstall of 10.2.3 and hope the drive is
> recognized and DVD Player subsequently loaded.  Other ideas?

This came up recently on another list, I think it was osxlist or g-books.
I thought I'd kept the response, but can't find it.  Essentially there is
a utility that allows you to extract the DVD Player from the installation
CD as a separate package and install it manually, and this is reported to
work with third-party drives.  Questions of licensing exist.

Hope this is enough info for you to work with, or someone else can chime
in.

KeS