Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

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 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).

Note

DVD Player doesn’t work (and doesn’t even get installed) on certain older Macs, including the “Wall Street” PowerBook 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, using the CDs & DVDs panel of System Preferences.)

Playing a Movie

If DVD Player starts out playing your movie in a window, your first act should be to choose Video→Enter Full Screen (-0). At this point, the movie screen fills your entire monitor—even the menu bar disappears. (To make it reappear, move your cursor near the top of the screen.)

At this point, you’re ready to play the movie. By far the easiest way is to just press the Space bar—once to start, again to pause, again to start again.

You can also use the “remote control,” which is deconstructed in Figure 10-8. Or just use the keyboard:

• Press Shift--right arrow to fast-forward; press ...