Macintosh TV -- Any Ideas on DVD Hack?

[Scott Baret]

If you read another thread on here, you may have found that I want to get my Mac TV operational as an actual television set. I know I'll probably need to have a few things re-capped inside of it for starters, and I'd like to find the original restore discs for it (currently I have a fresh 7.5.3 install on it). Preferably, I also swap out the hard drive for something more reliable than the ProDrive ELS currently inside.

My first order of business is cleaning up the case. I know some folks have recommended bumper polish for automobiles for the TV, and I actually have some of that sitting around from my old Volvo. I may try that some day when I have nothing better to do (although that's going to be tough until May since I'm currently training for a half marathon).

Next, I want to get the electronics in working order and also get the equipment I need to tune the TV. The box I'm currently using on my main set works great and I'll probably get another one similar to it. Ditto the antenna, which has an amplifier on it and is perfect for the apartment complex I live in.

Once all of that is squared away, I want to take this TV further. Although I have a DVD player I can hook up to it, my stretch goal is to put a DVD player inside the Mac TV in place of the current CD-ROM drive.

My obstacles:

1. Getting it to work as both a DVD player and the Mac's CD-ROM drive. I realize this may not even be possible unless someone writes a driver for it.

2. Finding a caddy-load DVD drive so I don't have to modify the original bezel (although I suppose a black-painted bezel from a 575 would work if I needed it to).

3. Possibly hooking it up to the jacks on the back without making this thing look ugly (I'd prefer not to do this simply because I want to leave those open for some other period-specific electronic, perhaps a VCR or my old NES).

Any ideas? I've done a few quick searches and it looks like nobody has done this before, but I do know of people who have modified Color Classics to include other drives so I suppose it isn't impossible.

 

[uniserver]

you have no way to decode the dvd…

no dvd hardware compensation. a cpu that is not able to SW decode it.

and no software. maybe some powermac/iMac 233mhz + OS9 + ATI RAGE II+ +/-

minimum would be PPC 233mhz, + this

or this for the slot loaders?

 

[Gorgonops]

I may be wrong about this, but I would swear to remembering at some point someone (on this board?) posted their discovery that a cheap broken DVD player they disassembled was actually using an IDE DVD-ROM mechanism attached to a small control/decoder board, and that the "brains" worked to play DVDs when connected to another DVD-ROM drive they had lying around. I'd suggest that *maybe* if you could find such a DVD player and the "Brain Board" was small enough to wedge into the system somewhere you might be able to try some goshawful hack of making the drive switchable between the motherboard and the DVD decoder... but isn't a Mac TV's drive SCSI, not IDE?

(Oooh, so what you do is you hang the DVD player board and a SCSI-IDE bridge off a cable going to the drive, and add a toggle switch that powers either one up depending on what you're planning on doing with the machine; presumably it would be safe to have both IDE controllers present on the cable if only one were powered on at a time? Maybe? I wouldn't swear to it actually.)

Another option would be to sink a *lot* of time, effort, and pain into applying something like the "Takky" mod for Color Classics to your MacTV, stuffing in the fastest PowerMac 5/6500-series board you can find along with compatible video capture device, and either using a G3 card and a software solution or trying to wedge in a DVD decoder PCI card in for the disk playing. But of course this solution would involve irrevocable modifications to your machine's case and wiring. At that point you might as well go all the way and simply gut it, replace the monitor with VGA tube that fits, and place a Mac Mini or likewise inside it along with a USB HD tuner and DVD drive.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

It sounds more to me like you just want to put a regular DVD Movie Player in there to feed the TV, would that be correct?

If so: The Memorex DVD Player in the MacintoshClassicIIIColorTVp™ would be my suggestion.

From the info in Ports and Pinouts, it looks like you've limited to a Co-Axial Antenna feed into that thing?

If that's the case, unless you really want to keep it stock, I'd strongly suggest hacking ANYTHING with a TV Tuner setup with the S-Video feed in there. Even a RoadApple PPC with the tuner card would be a huge improvement over that board for just about anything imaginable and you'd get IDE/Silent SD Boot capability as an added bonus.

The cool thing about the Memorex DVD Players is that they have an extra inch of plastic tray up front of the DVD that's just perfect for cutting down fitting about a half to three quarters of an inch of the @$$ end of a cartridge cartridge to, but PLEASE paint it black, the MacTV looks just shy of butt ugly with a beige cartridge stuck in its black maw.

p.s. I'm glad that S-Video out Tuner Box is working out nicely.

 

[techknight]

Theres a way to do it. but its not going to be easy. Youll need a DVD brain that allows IDE drive to work as a DVD player, and has a composite output.

you can then attach that cable as a Y-Split to an IDE/SCSI adapter. This was explained earlier in the thread.

But then from that point, you can make a MCU-Arduino or compatible style control PCB. This would have a mux matrix to switch between the DVD decoder and the IDE-SCSI adapter. There needs to be another mux on the same control circuit, that wedges between the composite NTSC signal output from the tuner and selects DVD or Tuner.

The arduino board can be connected to the macs serial port. This way, You can run an app on the MAC to switch it from CDROM mode to DVD video mode. ;-)

Or if your clever, and have documentation on how to operate the mactv hardware, you could write your own apple video player style app, and put a DVD button on it. Soon as you press DVD, arduino gets the signal and switches everything over.

Thats just the hackerish option.

The only other option, is make a proprietary PDS card that is a off-board decoder. Kinda like the old G3 stuff.

Only way this would work, is use a SCSI DVDROM, it would become a bus-master and spool up the drive, fetch the DVD information, decode into a raw frame-buffer video and output it into display refresh memory. This is assuming of course the datarate of the SCSI bus and drive itself can keep up with the correct mpeg2 decoding rate.

 

[Byrd]

The "basic option" would be to find a tiny consumer DVD player (of which there are heaps), which you could fit under the Mac TV quite nicely and connect to composite input. Most of them even run @ 12V so you could even run it off a molex power splitter cable in the Mac TV.

What is the input quality of the Mac TV like? As much as I love my 5500/300 machine, the input quality is at a very low resolution and makes most things (bar retro consoles) look terrible. Not something you'd enjoy using all the time.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Have you tried the S-Video input on your 5500/Tuner?

I still think it'd be better to just replace the stock Cartridge Loader with a cartridge faced, skinny-tray Loader DVD Player. Use an external CD if necessary, but what the heck can you do with that POS MacTV/CC board that needs CD support.That has to be one of the very worst offerings ever. The DVD plays Music CDs just fine.

 

[techknight]

Have you tried the S-Video input on your 5500/Tuner?
I still think it'd be better to just replace the stock Cartridge Loader with a cartridge faced, skinny-tray Loader DVD Player. Use an external CD if necessary, but what the heck can you do with that POS MacTV/CC board that needs CD support.That has to be one of the very worst offerings ever. The DVD plays Music CDs just fine.

You got a point. Other than OS installs, or various CD-ROM based Games (few). Then theres really no point of having CDROM. Replace the drive with DVD only, and use a DVD board back into composite/svideo/audio and done.

 

[Scott Baret]

Well, I do happen to own three Apple CD300e drives...one of those could always get hooked up should I need to perform a restore...