The beast...
Today the star of this post is a glorious iMac G3 DV Blueberry! This is the 400MHz CPU version, with a DVD player.
Image from www.vectronicsappleworlds.com
The system installed is Mac OS 10.2.8 a.k.a Jaguar.
DVD playback
With DV iMac, DVD playback comes straight out of the box. The Apple installed software works great.
Only concern might be the slot loading DVD reader. It's known that with age this reader tends to keep the disc inserted... paper clip always does the trick to eject manually the disc.
Hard drive capacity limit
If one wants to listen music, or watch video, the original hard drive might be too small: 10 GB full at 90% is not very useful.
Upgrading to bigger hard drive is not easy on these machines. Indeed the hard drive is difficult to reach as shown in this iFixit tutorial
In addition the interface used to connect the hard drive is IDE with an IDC 40 pins connector. This kind of Hard Drive are not easy to find, see here for second-hand.
Of course adaptators exist, for example IDE to Sata (like below) to play with a SSD for example, or IDE to Compact Flash.
Since there are 2 FireWire400 connectors available on this G3, it's possible to hook up an external hard drive. But on these machines there is no Large Drive Support (as mentionned in Mactracker) it means that only a maximum of 128 GB per drive is possible. Due to this limitation larger hard drives have to be partitionned in chunk of less than 128 GB.
Lubuntu was of great help to partition a 160 GB hard drive in 120 GB and 40 GB, indeed Windows 10 has dropped support of FAT32 in the Disk tool.
The two partitions appeared on the iMac's desktop. So it's possible to divide a big hard drive in smaller pieces and still using the whole capacity.
Quicktime playback of MP4
As explained on the Wikipedia page of Quicktime, Quicktime 6 support only partially the MPEG-4 format using only Simple Profile. H264 encoding and decoding comes later with Quicktime 7 and it was shipped with Mac OS 10.4 Tiger.
To test video-playback on such a low end computer (comparing to today Smartphones) the system must be first upgraded to Mac OS 10.4.11
After upgrade, the Quicktime version is 7.0.4 compatible with MP4 H264 video files. But the iMac is to slow to read correctly the video file.
Even with new version of Quicktime (7.6.4) and Perian 1.2.3 installed it was not possible.
And VLC was not stable enough, nor fast enough to read properly the file.
Even switching to MPEG-2 encoding for the video file to test, and adding MPEG-2 Quicktime component was not enough to read properly a video file.
Conclusion
An iMac G3 is a good home TV Theater for DVDs.
That's all he can do!
Having a good DVD reader is therefore mandatory, but difficult with this aging machine and their slot-loading feature.
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