Matshita SR-8184/Matshita SR-8184-B

Hey Craig,

Can I replace the Matshita CW-8133 slot loading CD-RW drive with a Matshita SR-8184 or Matshita SR-8184-B slot loading DVD-ROM drive & be able to play DVDs?

I have a SR-8184-B and I'm pretty sure I had it running in a 400.

I remember reading in an Apple Knowledge Base Article that my Mac may be missing a DVD Decoder card necessary to make DVD playback work properly. Do I need to buy that too in addition the Matshita slot loading DVD-ROM drive to play DVDs?

I don't recall ever seeing a special card in the iMac CRTs. According to the service manual for the 350 and 400s:
"There are three shipping configurations: iMac (good), iMac
DV (better), and iMac DV Special Edition (best).
• 350-MHz (good) or 400-MHz (better/best) Power PC
G3 processor
• one of the following hard drives:
– 6 GB EIDE (good)
– 10 GB EIDE (better)
– 13 GB EIDE (best)
• one of the following optical drives:
– 24x-speed, slot-load ATAPI CD-ROM drive (good)
– 4x-speed, slot-load, ATAPI DVD-ROM drive
(better/best)"
There is no mention of a special card in the DVD model.
What does need to happen is that you'll have to install the DVD-ROM and reinstall system software or use Pacifist to install DVD player since it won't have been installed when you did the install on your iMac since it didn't have a DVD player in there.
Also you'll want to make sure that it's an Apple branded item since this model was also put in PCs and those didn't have the proper chipset to work with a Mac. Maybe that's what you're thinking about.
Richard

Message was edited by: spudnuty

Craig,
Thanks for the star!
Richard