Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Playing DVD Movies

If your Mac has a DVD drive (or a combo DVD/CD-RW drive or SuperDrive), you’re in for a treat. Your Mac can play rented or purchased Hollywood movies on DVD as though it was born to do so.

Watching movies on your Mac screen couldn’t be simpler: Just insert the DVD. The Mac automatically detects that it’s a video DVD—as opposed to, say, one that’s just filled with files—and launches the DVD Player program (Figure 10-8).

Figure 10-8. Top: DVDs on your screen! Bottom: You can orient this controller either horizontally or vertically on your screen by choosing one of the commands in the Controls→Select Controller Type submenu. You can also do without this remote control altogether, since all of its buttons have keyboard equivalents.

Note

DVD Player doesn’t work (and doesn’t even get installed) on certain older Macs, including bronze-keyboard PowerBook G3 (Lombard) laptops and early blue-and-white Power Macs.

If DVD Player doesn’t start up automatically when you insert a DVD movie, you can open it yourself. It’s sitting there in your Applications folder. (Then fix the problem as described in Section 8.3.)

If DVD Player starts out playing your movie in a window, your first act should be to choose one of the commands from the Video menu to enlarge the picture. Maximum Size is better, except that it leaves the Dock and the menu bar exposed.

For best results, choose Video→Enter ...