Mac OS X to the Max: And DVD for All

This section contains some additional info for your DVD enjoyment.

DVD Player Keyboard Shortcuts

Table 19.2 contains keyboard shortcuts for DVD Player.

Table 19.2. Keyboard Shortcuts for DVD Player

Action	Keyboard Shortcut
DVD Menu	+'
Eject	+E
Highlight DVD menu options	Up, Down, Left, Right arrows
Horizontal Controller	Shift++H
Next chapter	Right arrow
Previous chapter	Left arrow
Play/Pause	Spacebar
Vertical Controller	Shift++V
Viewer size to half	+1
Viewer size to normal	+2
Viewer size to maximum	+3
Viewer size to full screen	+0
Scan backward	+Left arrow
Scan forward	+Right arrow
Select DVD menu options	Return
Show/Hide Controller	Ctrl+C
Show/Hide Info Window	Ctrl+I
Show/Hide Viewer	Ctrl+V
Stop	+.
Mute	+K
Volume up	+Up arrow
Volume down	+Down arrow

Turning Your Mac into a Home Theater System

Unless you have an Apple Cinema Display (and even if you do have one), you might want to use your Mac to see movies at a larger size than what your monitor provides. After all, even with a 23-inch monitor, viewing movies on a Mac is not practical for more than one or two people.

The solution to this is to add a projector to your system. You can attach a projector to any Mac that has a video out port (which all modern Macs do have). Then you can project your movies to almost-theater size for an even better movie experience. And you can also project the Web to that size along with any other tasks you do on your Mac.

NOTE

A PowerBook or iBook and a portable projector make an instant movie theater wherever you are.

One of the best projectors I have seen is the Mitsubishi X80U (see Figure 19.23). This projector projects with 1500 Lumens and has all the input and output ports you need. Its image quality is amazing when connected to a G4 PowerBook, I was able to show movies that looked spectacular and up to enormous screen sizes (I was able to have the size as large as 8 feet in the horizontal direction, and I was limited to that only because my room wasn't big enough to move the projector farther back!).

Figure 19.23. The Mitsubishi X80U projector provides excellent performance and versatility.

And just as easily as you can project your movies, you can project the Web, your iMovies, slide shows, images, and anything else you work with.

Although projectors are fairly expensive (at press time, you could get the X80 for about $3,000), they are comparably priced to a big-screen HDTV television. And by adding an HDTV tuner, you can also project HDTV images with many projectors as well. So the projector can be used with various sources in addition to your Mac.

NOTE

Check out the X80 at www.largescreen.com/Products/x80.html.

To add better sound from your Mac theater, you can also route the sound output of your Mac to your sound system, or if your Mac can accept PCI cards, you can install a surround sound card to achieve digital sound as well.