SATA DVD with PATA adapter

[waynestewart]

In a fit of stupidity I decided to upgrade my blueray combo drive to a blueray burner. On the good side that left me with a Pioneer combo drive to play with. So I attached a PATA adapter and installed it in my MDD running 10.5. Played a DVD movie on it, booted an installer disk by holding down the c key. Also burned a DVD with Toast.

Next I moved it over to a Yikes running OS 9.2.2. Seemed to work the same as any ide optical drive. Booted 10.4 and that went well enough too

Only issue so far is that when playing a DCD in either machine, the audio output from the DVD is very very low. Same using both the Apple DVD player and VLC. I'll try a different adapter when i get home. There’s no audio connector so OS9 is out unless you’re into subtitles

 

[Gorgonops]

Uhm... the audio from a DVD is in no way decoded by the drive; it's embedded "alongside" the picture data and is almost always an "encoded" format like MP2 or AC-3 and I've *never* seen a DVD playing app that required an analog audio connector be present between the DVD drive and the computer's sound card. (All that analog wire is for is playing "Red Book" format CD audio tracks, which almost no modern software does anymore.) If the picture plays acceptably I can't even begin to come up with a reason why the SATA-PATA adaptor should affect the audio volume level.

 

[waynestewart]

Oops, brain crosswired CD and DVD sound.

Tried a different ide adapter with the same results. Also tried it with OS9 on the yikes with the same results.

Just to make sure the drive wasn't defective, I tried it with the SATA card in my MDD and I have lots of sound

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

Must just be a quirk of the adapter. This is a Blu-ray combo drive, or a DVD unit? I'd love to see someone attempt to get a G4 to decode a Blu-ray over PATA and play it...

 

[waynestewart]

It's a  Blu-ray combo drive.

A while ago I tried a Blu-ray disk in the drive connected to the SATA card and the G4 didn't seem to recognize the disks format.

 

[CC_333]

It wouldn't be totally inconceivable to try a Blu-ray disk in a fast G4 running the newest version of Mac OS X it can (or maybe Linux?) with a FUSE blob or something to enable support for the format, but I doubt the results would be satisfactory because even the fastest G4s are probably too slow for this sort of stuff (maybe a 2.0 GHz Dual G4, *maybe*). Late model Dual and Quad G5s could probably do it, however.

c

 

[Gorgonops]

Oops, brain crosswired CD and DVD sound.

Tried a different ide adapter with the same results. Also tried it with OS9 on the yikes with the same results.

.. But if you pull this out and substitute a PATA DVD drive without changing anything else the sound sounds normal? That makes absolutely zero sense. Digital bits are going from that drive to your computer and they're either going to make it or not; there's nothing in any adaptor that's going to magically adjust the output amplitude.

 

[waynestewart]

A PATA DVD drive has normal sound in both machines.