A lot of people bought PS2's to play their DVD's in 2000-2001.

Commonly available as an aftermarket drive + MPEG2 card combo, probably Christmas 1997. I would say it was still a special feature until midway through 1999. Multimedia was exciting, but people didn't really want to watch their movies on their little CRT's and PC sound equipment, even if the system could play them back perfectly.

I know it was still of no concern to me in 2001, when I shopped for a CD burner.

My Compaq Presario 4840 came with DVD drive in late '97. Interestingly, it didn't come with a decoder card. It relied on the CPU (P2-266) and whatever acceleration was offered by the onboard Rage Pro. It worked well enough under Win95, as long as you didn't try doing anything else during playback. When I upgraded to Win2000, it didn't quite have the power for completely smooth playback.

I had my first dvd-rom drive back in 2004 or 2005, i remember that it was the second upgrade on my Athlon XP 2400+ rig, the first one being 512MB of RAM(i had 256 before, it wasn't good enough for gaming on windows xp)

I don't remember when DVD drives were standard on OEM machines because I built my own systems at that time. I do recall quite a few people have DVD/CDR drives and then DVD-R exploded and all drives shipper were burners.

A DVD-R drive is usually the only period incorrect piece in my SS7 and 440BX builds. I like to use Norton Ghost 2003 to create disk images of the OS with different video and sound cards and their appropriate drivers already installed. I just swap out cards, then restore from a DVD pulled from a library of different combos.

My oldest DVD drive is a Hitachi GD-2000 made in 1997. It works, but just barely. I suppose it needs to be cleaned. The only reason I've kept it is because it's a much older model than any other DVD drive I've ever found, and that makes it a little interesting I guess.
I don't remember where it came from, but I certainly didn't get it new. I didn't get my first DVD reader until 2002 or 03, by which time they were pretty common. That drive didn't get along with copy protected CDs, which seemed strange given how old an issue that was by then.

Like firage, in 2001 I was shopping for a better CD burner and didn't care about DVD drives yet. They were certainly out there but felt like a niche luxury item since nobody was requiring them to install anything. The only apparent use for a reader was to watch movies. DVD-R drives were useful for burning backups, but I think the burners and blank discs were still kind of expensive and unproven (at least in my own mind anyway).

I remember i buyed the Creative PC-DVD Encore Dxr2 bundle as soon it came to retail in Norway. Think it was early in 1998 and installed it in my Pentium 233MMX rig and used to play DVDs hooking it up to a 32" Salora Widescreen CRT. Sold my Pioneer LaserDisc player and 300+ movies some months later.

Baoran wrote:

What year did internal IDE dvd drives become commonly available for PCs?
Basically I am wondering if I build a period correct pc what are the earliest PCs that would be likely to have a dvd drive instead of a cd drive.

I got my first DVD Drive in (late) 2001, they were uncommonly available in 2000 and obscenely expensive before that.

My Gateway Essential also came with a DVD-ROM drive in December 1999, (PIII 500 model).

In 2002 I bought a Dell Dimension 4550 (P4 2.4B) for around $1200 and it had a DVD-ROM and CD-RW drive. The DVD burner option was still pricey at that point, but I recall adding a DVD burner by 2003 or 2004 when they became cheaper.

I have a 50pin SCSI Sony cartridge fed DVD drive sitting on a shelf. I think it's from 97ish