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Anyone tried iDVD 4 on a low-end G4?

B

brorson3

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 12, 2004
1
0
After Christmas I was planning to add a Pioneer "SuperDrive" to my 400MHz G4 and pick up iLife so that I could use iDVD to burn some of my home movies to DVD. Now the new version of iLife is out, and I definitely want the new iPhoto and iMovie, but the new iDVD lists a 733MHz G4 as its minimum recommendation.

I am willing to put up with slow iDVD performance (I expect that on a G4-400), but I'm wondering if anyone has tried installing it on a slower G4 to see if it is usable, or if it will even install (or can be hacked to install). I'm hoping to eek a little more life out of my G4 before shelling out for a G5.

Thanks for your comments and help!
 
Yup. Also have a "low end" G4 w/400-whatever mhz processor (what a workhorse!). Installed my own "superdrive" a month or two ago (after being told it wouldn't work by the "experts" at you-know-where...) - enough of that... YES! It works! Most of the iLife apps seem to be quicker, a little more stable... iDVD 4 works fine. Expect longer encoding times, of course, than with iDVD 3. Resulting files are larger - comparing identical projects encoded to DVD by 3 vs. 4. Video quality seems to be marginally better with 4 than 3 on a < 60 min. file. Transitions still have that "spotty" quality as compared to transfers to video tape. "Progress bar" at the top of iDVD 4 doesn't give feedback as well as it did in iDVD 3 (it lied to you in 3 as well, but at least it gave it to you in numberical form!). My personal choice was to leave iDVD 3 installed on another drive so I could choose between the two. Haven't checked out the supposed faster transition render times of iMovie 4 yet, but seems to work fine at first glance. GarageBand is a hoot! Number of playable tracks seem to be limited by our older beasts, but as I do most of my serious music composition using a combination of serious tools like ProTools, Cubase, etc., and MIDI, GarageBand is still mostly a (cool-working, well laid-out) novelty at this point.

go for it!
 
I have a 400MHz G4. I have 256 MB of memory and a 120GB hard drive, but otherwise the machine is as I bought it. I'm running OS X 10.2.8.
This week I installed a Pioneer DVR-A06U (superdrive). I installed the new iLife package except for Garage Band.
Using iDVD, I burned my first movie. It was nearly two hours long and it had chapter markers AND motion themes. It worked!
Now for the bad news-It took between 12 and 20 hours! I gave up and went to bed so I don't know exactly when it finished. However, I'm not too discouraged, because the DVD is darn near the limit (2 hours) of iDVD4.
 
Wow. Darylcraig, I know you didn't ask for advice, but I'll bet not only iDVD but your whole Mac experience would be improved by boosting your 256MB RAM to at least 512MB but preferably 1GB.

When I play with the new PowerBooks in the store and feel them stutter with more than one or two apps open, I am so glad I boosted my (slower clock speed) older Mac's RAM and never experience any of that.

The way I see it, 256MB is enough to run Panther without swapping. And one or two small apps. Load any heavy hitters and you'll definitely feel it.

RAM is Good.


Crikey
 
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