So last night i borrowed the Combo drive from Dad's PC laptop. The drive is a TEAC DW-224E. I removed the mounting gear and interface board for the laptop from it, and put on the mounting gear and interface board required for the iMac (from the ol' 24x CD-ROM), and mounted it in the iMac, put the iMac together, and fired 'er up. Sadly i deleted DVD Player previously, thinking i'd never use it, so i fired up VLC, and put in a DVD. It played it! Not at a very good frame rate, but still....IT PLAYED IT! I haven't tried burning a CD yet, but ASP tells me that its a combo drive, and that its fully supported, so it should. Tried it in OS 9. In OS 9, sadly, the CD burning functions aren't supported (i haven't tried Toast yet), so you can only use it as a regular ol' DVD drive. But it IS bootable in both OS X and OS 9, it boots off the Mac OS CDs, just like the regular ol' CD-ROM drive. I don't know how easy this unit is to get, but if you want a good Combo drive for your tray load iMac, this is the one to get! It makes the front end of the iMac look butt-ugly, but it works GREAT!!!!!! I'm going to try and get my own, thats for sure.

hi!

You can also play dvd's through apple dvdplayer even if the mac didn't come with one by mounting a toast dvd file larger than 1Gb. I think this is how i managed to play dvd's through apple dvdplayer on a CD-ROM only eMac. Obviously you need an external DVD drive of some sort, or this same method can be used for playing VIDEO_TS folders

Forgive my ignorance, but why would this have NOT worked? I don't understand why it would be a suprise that replacing a CD drive with a DVD drive would enable DVD playback...

Likewise if you replaced that DVD drive with a DVD burner you'd have DVD burning capability?

Because its an old G3 with a 6 meg Rage Pro and 160 megs of RAM and no hardware DVD decoder.

That would simply mean that the worst thing that could happen is the playback could be choppy due to poor performance of the software decoding.

However, that said most machines these days all do software decoding - hardware decoding died a long while back.