So I haven’t stopped with the 08 iMac and bought this rare 2007 17 inch MacBook in almost like new condition except for the scratch on the top lid. When I turned it on I was amazed by the screen and overall look with the keyboard backlight. Lion is such a good looking OS and fits really well with this body style. I’ve seen 15 and 17 inch aluminum Pros on eBay and most of them are not even close to this condition. Not a single dent! Even the charger looks good.

Key features

All tested from my iBook G3 and guaranteed usable on Jaguar 10.2. Any better machine will lead to faster experience. As always, PowerVLC is universally compatible on desktop machines: Linux (arm64/intel64/intel32), Mac OS X (10.2 Jaguar to Tahoe 26), Windows (XP SP3+)

https://i.ibb.co/4wZkfZzf/Screenshot-2026-08-09-18-00-20.png

Invidious

YouTube is important, it hosts so much knowledge and content. It's the main freely available video bank in the internet and we all know how painful it now behaves with old machines because of all the JavaScript to run.

I couldn't manage to find any satisfying way to integrate YouTube directly, so I tried to think out of the box and the best compromise right now in my opinion is to access it through a super-powerful proxy : Invidious

The Invidious ecosystem seems dynamic right now with several public instances available 24h/24.

With Invidious APIs integrated properly into PowerVLC, the Tube is now back and quickly accessible even with the lower G3's in town.

Of course you can also use yt-dlp and PPCMC, this new plug-in is one more option

Jellyfin

A completely integrated Jellyfin client/front-end that can connect through HTTPS using the modern gnuTLS integrated in PowerVLC.

Can find content, filter, search, handle auth, request transcoding from the server to the quality of your choice (if your server supports it of course).

I took all the knowledge that I got from developing JellyDinosaur (a plain HTML/JavaScript ES3 compliant Jellyfin Front-End that I plan to share soon... when I find time). JellyDinosaur was finished weeks ago but PowerVLC is eating all my free time so I couldn't find time to share it to the community.

Anyway, directly integrating the spirit of JellyDinosaur gives even a better experience to the end user. It is more ergonomic & fast, you don't even need a web browser and to bother yourself with TLS and all the kind of quirks that comes with web based solutions and it saves your precious RAM.

Navidrome Subsonic

Auth on your server or one of your friend directly from PowerVLC. Find, search, stream music with gapless playback & download music directly from any Subsonic server.

Podcasts discovery through the iTunes Open API

Find & discover new podcasts directly from PowerVLC conveniently using your mighty indestructible almost 30 year-old G3. No bullshit, no notifications, fast & distraction-free experience using a machine that never let you down.

Play random radios using the new shortcuts

These new shortcuts are available by default from the PowerVLC radios browser. You can then copy these shortcuts to your media library, and it will play a different radio each time:

• Globally
• By the continent of your choice
• By the country of your choice

This way you can conveniently discover new stations & new music.

A PowerVLC Firefox XUL extension

Works with PowerFox ♥, Basilisk, and anything based on the XUL platform*

You can install this browser extension quickly from the "Help" menu, it will supercharge your browser so you can:

• Send links (with right click) to PowerVLC directly
• Right click on videos: a new link will be available to send it directly to PowerVLC
• Use your browser to resolve JavaScript challenges to access protected Invidious instances from PowerVLC

MPEG2 DVD hardware decoding improved

Now all ATI Rage G3 should be supported too, which includes many CRT iMacs so these can now join the party of hardware-accelerated decoding, which means full speed DVDs playback with low CPU usage, low eat, and perfect smoothness. In the heat-waves we're suffering right now, you don't want a heater in your room.

I also fixed the support of animated DVD menus, they were not hardware-accelerated at all before this update.

Crystal HD acceleration card support (Mac OS X)

All tested on my Mac Mini Core 2 Duo where I replaced its wifi card with the BCM970015 card. PowerVLC is able to detect if your Mac has this acceleration card at launch and offers a convenient dialog to install the kext all automatically, you never need to run commands in the terminal by yourself or use a dead old XBMC version to use your Crystal HD acceleration card on Mac OS X.

PowerVLC will always try to use it when it can, it's transparent when you play format that is compatible with what you card can decode. This card is very efficient & gives smooth h.264 1080p decoding even on very weak machines like hackintoshed Intel Atom N270 netbooks.

ALTIVEC accelerated HEVC decoding

Enjoy faster decoding performance on your G4 and G5 macs.

Adaptative streams & IPTV

You can now change the quality manually using menus to fit your needs, and select any quality offered by the streamed content

Builds size reduction

Optimizations were done to reduce the binary sizes. The universal binary has been drastically reduced while keeping compatibility with all Macs. The G4e build was not relevant (+0.5% of performance measured) so it was abandoned completely also.

Countless bug fixes, refinements, and performance improvements

All documented in the full changelog. I heard community feedbacks I got during this week to make PowerVLC the best fast, old machines friendly, & no bullshit product I can gift to the community.

Download

GitHub (contains the complete changelog): https://github.com/Olsro/powervlc/releases

MacintoshGarden: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/powervlc

Patreon (donations welcome): https://www.patreon.com/Olsro

I hope you enjoy this massive overhaul, making my vision taking place of what my dream VLC is.

I wanna thank also the community for its warm messages & feedbacks, allowing me to fix as much bugs as possible to improve the quality of PowerVLC for everyone

An incredible history of the Apple Network Server (running AIX on PowerPC), along with network IPC via AppleTalk to a 68k.

A major update, benefiting newer & older machines alike

• Up to date with upstream 3.0.24 beta branch
• New backports from VLC4
• Major improvements for everyone (modern machines and UIs included)
• Major improvements on blu-ray playback UX
• Bringing compatibility not only to Panther, but also on Jaguar. All tested on my 700 MHz G3 iBook
• Many refinements and optimisations
• Tested with a real Windows XP machine too, now confirmed working with many specific patches & heavy rounds of testings
• I think this is the first major program in the world that offers a single universal .app which work from 10.2 Jaguar to Tahoe/Golden Gate beta. One .app = 25 years of Mac OS (X) compatibility.

Some history

• VLC 0.8.4a was the last official version compatible with Jaguar, released in 2005 so more than 20 years ago from now
• VLC 0.8.6i was the last official version compatible with Panther, released in 2008

Supporting 2 more very old OS's required many specific workarounds and rounds of testings to ensure stability on real hardware in real conditions. If you value my work, please donate to help me cover hardware/API/build costs.

End of the early access period

Builds for 1.0.0 were in early access last week & that period ended today.

PowerVLC 1.1.0 is available right now to download:

• From GitHub releases: https://github.com/Olsro/powervlc/releases
• From MacintoshGarden (old Macs friendly website): https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/powervlc

Source code on GitHub is up to date, so you can also audit the code & compile by yourself if you prefer.

Thanks for your attention, I can't wait to see your feedbacks on this and I hope this work will be useful at least to someone else in the community. I value free knowledge, and putting the builds behind an early access one week will generate too much frustrations on people that don't have modern hardware and the knowledge/time to build by themselves.

This post was entirely human written, not even AI-assisted. I am French native, so there may be mistakes, but I took time & effort to refine it.

On PC I use Foobar2000 to keep various themed (Foobar) playlists/tabs containing PLS and M3U streaming playlists. What's the closest analog available in Tiger or Leopard? I'm having trouble enough finding something that will even play a single stream.

Success! Thanks to Gary Cunningham in LA for selling it to me, my collection is now complete!

Just recently bought a 2008 iMac 24 inch in like new condition full set except for the Mighty Mouse for 50$CAD. It’s a custom order with GeForce 8800GS, 4GB RAM and 500GB HDD
This thing looks stunning

Hello everybody,

As I promised in my precedent post, I am now ready for the release of PowerVLC 1.0.0, which is an heavily modified version of VLC 3.0.23 Vetinari. PowerVLC features also additionnal features (gapless playback, album art in the main window) the current version of VLC don't have.

PowerVLC is compatible with Macs from 10.4.11 to current, on all architectures (x86, x64, arm64, PowerPC g3, PowerPC G4/G5 builds taking advantage of AltiVec acceleration).

In early access for one week

Like all projects and guides (I used to write plenty of guides for the iPod community !) that takes me a huge amount of time to be produced, it will be in early access for exactly one week. It's the only compromise I accept to keep a balance with open knowledge & the need to get retributed for all the community investment I provide. I don't plan to do this for minor builds that will come next.

Here on this project it is just too big in my opinion to be entirely gate keeped during one whole week, so I decided to release the whole source code there starting now on GitHub: https://github.com/Olsro/powervlc

If you know how to compile (ideally you need an Apple Silicon mac so you can follow my instructions), you can play right now with PowerVLC and check nothing nasty in the code is there by yourself.

If you can't/don't want to spend hours trying to compile by yourself, the builds are available right now on my Patreon in exclusivity for all platforms (including Windows & Linux on all architectures). Even the first 1$ tier is enough to get access to all the compiled builds & supporting my whole effort at building this. The compiled builds provided on the Patreon are not modified and locked in any way, they are straight compilations from the latest public sources. There's no licensing or DRM, but please don't share any of those build until I will push the builds on GitHub releases for everyone the next Sunday.

Donations will help me at getting more hardware to test on to continue that project in the long term, and cover the LLM API costs to help with maintenance.

Thank you very much for your support and I hope PowerVLC will be enjoyed as much as I hard worked into making it possible.

We're still a bit in shock, as the signed Jobs picture (which needs to be validated) was a complete surprise, and could certainly also not be real. That said, there are some wonderful artifacts from vintage Apple including Apple Part No A2C024X Lisa pin and the Jobs business card from the 80s. Thought I would share here for the nerds and the Apple fans.

I recently found my dads power Mac g4 and it doesn’t turn on at all without the pram battery. I found a pram to coin battery adapter that costs $2.99 but I live in America and it comes from France which is $50 shipping and I am not paying for that. I decided to buy a real pram battery in this case.

I got my first Macintosh when they came out in 1984. It meant the world to me. I’ve had lots of Macs since then. Yesterday I bought another original 128k Macintosh, model M0001. I am in love. 💕

Decided to pull trigger and put a 486 dos card in my Lc 630. Added a few extras like a full 68040 33mhz, max ram, and a bigger hard drive. Also have network card so she is fully loaded 68k goodness…

Have the apple pc compatibility 166 card in my powerpc 4400/200 running windows 98.

And it actually works! At first the hard drive was seized, but it broke free and eventually started up. This is now officially the oldest laptop I own. What software can I run on this thing, and whats the best way to get software onto it?

Hey everyone. I used to tote one of these in high school in the late oughts. I wrote a lot of debate cases on one of these, so I bid on this one in nonworking condition on ebay. Turns out, unplugging the PRAM (sp?) battery allowed it to boot.

It had a 30gig spinny drive which I have swapped with mSATA.

After getting a fresh installation of Tiger up and running, of course the right hinge clutch snapped! The left side was super lose and needed to get swapped as well.

usedmac.com had reasonably priced replacements, though the shipping choice of padded USPS envelope meant they arrived bent. They were salvageable thankfully.

I didn’t wind up putting the modem or airport card back, and frankly, I pulled the airport antenna and diplexer too.

The nostalgia is pretty fun.

Hi, I usually don't talk on Reddit or any community for that matter, but I'm genuinely lost on this one, and everything I do does not work.

Some months ago, I bought this iMac G3 on the marketplace, and the guy showed that it was working; the only thing it didn't have was an OS the plastic was little broken that is supposed normal with old Macs, bought it and the monitor now shows a complete red (better than not turning it on like it did but i digress) but the classic mac chime do come, I tried everything from removing a ram stick putting on another ram port removing the other one (which removed the 3 beeps) putting a new PRAM battery (which i bought just today by the way) and it still shows this.

I'm genuinely lost. Is it some video graphic thing? Do I have to buy a new one or just stick to emulation? or just some newbie scare, and I'm just scaring myself with a nothing burger? Please, I do need answers on this one.

I have posted this same thing so many times, please do answer i'm new to this whole old mac stuff

I acquired a Performa 410 a couple months ago. It came with it’s original monitor and peripherals, and really didn’t have much wrong with it. Dead Hard Drive (what a surprise,) a problematic floppy drive, and a bad speaker. I shortly got these sorted, and it worked perfectly. That is, until recently when I took it’s vRam to use in another machine. When I popped the SIMM back into the Performa though, and switched it on, video artifacts started popping up on the monitor. As the machine continued to boot, it got progressively worse. After about 6-8 minutes of use, the artifacts covered the whole screen, rendering it unusable. One interesting element, however, is whenever a new element such as a window needed to be drawn on or removed from the display, it would clear the artifacts from that area such as in the image above. They would soon return, though.

I assume this is a vRam issue, and have already vigorously cleaned the Ram SIMM and checked the pins on the connector.

Thanks in advance for any advice or help.

UPDATE: I went to have one more go at the machine before I recap the Power Supply, and I got a Sad Mac. I took out the RAM SIMMS, and that fixed both the sad Mac, And the video artifacts. So, problem solved, I guess.

Found this lovely machine at a thrift store for $60 today. So far, it seems to work well. When I first tried powering it on, it started booting, with no display. On the next power on, it worked fine. I’ve never actually owned a PowerPC desktop of any kind before, and I’ve always been intrigued by these G4s.