Are geronimo card and DVD Studio Pro mutually exclusive?

When I first bought my Protools turnkey system a couple of years ago, I was told that my Geronimo dual monitor card and DVD playback were incompatible. Fine. My G4 would be unable to play back DVD's. Now I want to put the Pioneer DVR-A05 in my system and install DVD Studio Pro 1.5, which requires 9.2.2 OS, which is what I currently have installed. I want to be able to burn DVD's on my Protools 5.1.3-resident system; I will be perfectly happy to play DVD's back on another device. Is anyone aware of any device or extension conflicts that might arise with such an installation on a Protools system? I am already running FCP3 and Aftereffects and mtools on my system, and it runs pretty well. Any seeds of wisdom will be planted and watered frequently. -John

I don't know the answer, but the reason the Jeronimo doesn't play back DVDs isn't that there's a conflict, it's that the Apple DVD Player needs certain hardware (i.e. display cards) to run. It isn't a software-only player, and I was told that for potential DVD piracy reasons, Appian wasn't able to get the info from Apple to make it work with the J2000. My guess is that this has nothing to do with burning DVDs. But if you run into problems, the days of $800 cards being necessary to run two monitors are long gone. ATI Radeon 7000 cards sell for a little over $100, and they're actually quite a bit snappier than the Jeronimo.

Thanks Nick Batzdorf. -JCG

I have a dual 1 gig G4 (pre mirror) and I run both Pro Tools and when needed DVD studio Pro. However, despite having a Cinema display and a VGA monitor on a standard NVidia card (came with computer, I too get the warning that Apple DVD Player will not work with my config. I have always wondered about this, but my Studio Pro totally works as does the preview mode.

Update: I have installed DVD Studio Pro and put an Apple Superdrive (a Pioneer DVR-105) internally in my system. DVD Studio Pro launches and functions, but the Preview mode does not work. DVD player does not work. It is looking for some ATI extensions, extensions which are presumably copacetic with an ATI Radeon card mentioned by Batzdorf. Apple say that DVD Player software must function in order for DVD Studio Pro's preview mode to work. Even to preview audio! I hate having to throw away the Geronimo which cost me a bloody fortune to get a dirt cheap ATI but what can I do. Not being able to use Preview Mode is a significant limitation, but I have yet to find out whether I can actually burn a DVD disk with this setup. I'm working on that now. Preview mode is very important to verify whether a complex, fully -designed DVD you create with it will function as promised. The manual does not provide a "quick start" option for simple burns. Don't expect do be burning DVD's on your first day with the program. Or even the first week. The relevancy of this topic to Protools is that my G4 was designed from the ground up to function as a Protools system (The Geronimo card was the spec card at the time), and I am sharing compatibility issues with other programs. -John