Section 8.10. DVD Movies

8.10. DVD Movies

If your Mac has a DVD drive (a combo drive or SuperDrive), you're in for a treat. Your Mac can play rented or purchased movies on DVD as though it were born to do so.

Watching movies on your Mac screen couldn't be simpler: Just insert the DVD. The Mac detects that it's a video DVD (as opposed to, say, a music DVD) and, unless you've fiddled with your preference settings, opens the DVD Player program (Figure 8-16).

Figure 8-16. Top: A DVD on your screen! Use your mouse to click the buttons , if you like; that's a lot more direct than having to use the arrow keys on a remote control.
Bottom: You can orient this controller either horizontally or vertically on your screen by choosing Controls Use Vertical Controller.

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 monitoreven the menu bar disappears. (To make it reappear, just 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 baronce to start, again to pause, again to start again. You can also use the onscreen remote control. (Use the commands in the Controls menu to choose a vertical or horizontal orientation for the remote.)

---

Tip: Watching a movie while sitting in front of your iMac or Power Mac is not exactly the great American movie-watching dream. But remember that you can connect the video-output jacks of your Mac (most models) to your TV for a much more comfortable movie-watching experience.Just be sure to connect the cables from the Mac's video-output jacks directly to the TV. If you connect them to your VCR instead, you may get a horrible, murky, color -shifting picturethe result of the built-in copy-protection circuitry on your VCR.

---