DVD Player
A bonus appendix for “OS X Yosemite: The Missing Manual”
Watching movies on the screen of a Mac that has a DVD drive couldn’t be simpler: Just insert a movie DVD. Unless
you’ve fiddled with your preference settings, the DVD Player program opens and begins playing the movie in a fullscreen mode. (Even the menu bar disappears. To make it reappear, move your cursor to near the top of the screen.)
Note: If DVD Player doesn’t open 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 System PreferencesÆCDs & DVDs.)
Playing a Movie
Once DVD Player starts playing your movie, you can move your mouse to the bottom of the screen, at any time, to
bring up the control bar (Figure 1).
Figure 1:
Top: Even in full-screen mode,
you can control the playback and
navigate the disc using the new,
translucent, pop-up control bar.
One especially cool feature is the
Player Settings button. It opens
the Zoom controls window shown
here, which gives you manual
control over the width and height
of the picture on your screen.
Don’t miss the scrubber bar at
the very bottom, either. It lets you
scroll directly to any spot in the
DVD.
Bottom: When you’re not in fullscreen mode, you get a separate,
floating “remote control.” It has
most of the same controls, but
they’re arranged with a more 1999
sort of design aesthetic.
Scrubber bar
Languages,
Subtitles
Eject
DVD
Click to see
elasped time/
time remaining
Picture
controls
Exit
full screen
Slo Mo
Frame Advance
Return to Movie
Subtitles
Language
Angle
Previous chapter/Next chapter
(Hold to scan backward/forward)
Or just use the keyboard controls, which appear here in this clip ’n’ save cheat sheet:
FunctionKeystroke
Play, Pause
space bar
Fast-forward, rewind
Shift-c->, Shift-c-< (press repeatedly to cycle to 3, 8, 16, and 32 times normal speed)
Skip forward/back 5 seconds
Option-c->, Option-c-<
Louder, quieter
c-,, c-.
Mute/unmuteOption-c-.
Next/previous “chapter”
>, <
Full-screen mode on/off
c-F
Half, normal, maximum size
c-1, c-2, c-3
Eject
c-E
Add a bookmark
c-= (equal sign)
Language Fun
Most Hollywood DVDs have been programmed with onscreen subtitles to help those with hearing impairments and
those sitting in noisy bars. The Subtitle button offers a pop-up menu of alternative languages and subtitle options.
Tip: For real fun, turn on English subtitles but switch the soundtrack to a foreign language. No matter how trashy the movie you’re watching, you’ll gain
much more respect from your friends and family when you tell them you’re watching a foreign film.
Chapter Thumbnails
A standard Hollywood DVD comes programmed with chapters—invisible markers that let you jump from the beginning
of one important scene to the next. To see them in DVD Player, just move your mouse to the top of the screen. A row
of chapter thumbnail images appears, which you can click to jump around in.
You can create your own scene thumbnails, too. That might not be an especially tempting feature when you’re playing
Hollywood DVDs. But on homemade DVDs, made either by you or by somebody else, these custom scene markers can
be handy signposts.
First choose WindowÆChapters (c-B) to open the new chapter thumbnail palette. Here you’ll find the existing scene
breaks, which may or may not already have “poster frame” images.
All the action takes place in the Action menu (F) at the bottom of the panel. For example, it contains the Generate
Missing Thumbnails command, for use on DVDs that have chapter breaks but no little poster frames to represent them.
Whether there’s a poster frame for a particular chapter or not, you can substitute an image of your own. Find the exact
frame of the movie that you think looks better than what’s already in the Chapters palette; click the chapter in the palette, and, from the F pop-up menu, choose Use Current Frame for Thumbnail. Presto: You’ve replaced the unhelpful
(or nonexistent) chapter image with one that works better.
Parental Controls
The DVD parental controls in OS X aren’t much. You can’t say, for example, “Don’t play anything rated PG-13 or above”;
you have to rate each DVD yourself, one at a time.
But that’s better than nothing.
Insert the DVD you’re worried about. Choose FileÆGet Disk Info. Click the Parental Controls tab.
Click the l button and enter your administrator’s password. (Unless, of course, your 8-year-old is the administrator of
this Mac instead of you, in which case this DVD is the least of your problems.)
Now you can select either “Always ask for authorization” or “Always allow to be played,” depending on your feelings
about the movie. Click OK.
All you’ve done so far, however, is to specify what happens when you turn on parental controls—and you haven’t done
that yet. Choosing FeaturesÆEnable Parental Control does the trick.
When parental control is turned on, nobody can watch the “Always ask for authorization” DVDs without correctly
inputting your administrator’s password.
Which nobody knows except you. (Right?)
The Big Picture
Now, watching a movie while sitting in front of your Mac is not exactly the great American movie-watching dream.
Fortunately, every recent Mac has a video-output jack; with the proper cables, you can connect the Mac to your TV for
a much more comfortable movie-watching experience.
Of course, if you have an Apple TV, then you can pull off the same stunt without any wires at all, using AirPlay.