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.

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…

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