What is DVD Player?

Mac OS X includes a DVD application called DVD Player. Note that you must have a DVD-ROM drive (combo drive or SuperDrive) installed on your Mac in order to use the DVD Player application.

Starting with Mac OS X Tiger, you can view high-def content through DVD Player. You can watch DVDs played through DVD Player on your computer screen or on an external device (such as a television) provided that you use the proper connections from your Mac to that device. The icon show to the right is the DVD Player icon in Mac OS X Leopard.

Just insert a DVD into your drive, Mac OS X will mount the disc and identify it as a DVD and immediately launch DVD Player. You'll see the DVD Player control window appear once you move the cursor (with a mouse or trackpad).

By default, Mac OS X will start DVD Player in Full Screen mode. This as well as other setting scan be changed in DVD Player's Preferences. You can launch DVD Player by clicking on the icon shown on the upper right in the Applications folder. If you like to watch a lot of DVDs, you can add the DVD Player icon to the Dock for easy access. DVD Player will launch even without a DVD inserted into the drive, you'll just see a black window.

Once a DVD is inserted and begins to play in Full Screen mode, you can quickly change the viewing size by performing the following steps:

If you have a single button mouse press control and click the mouse button, if you have the Mighty Mouse or other mouse that has two buttons, press the right click button to display the menu as shown to the right.
Choose a size for DVD Player to use, half, normal, maximum, or full screen.

Note however that you can do other things via this window, such as quickly bringing up the DVD Menu, moving to the beginning of the disc, going to a particular chapter, and switching to Finder.

You're in Control
DVD Player allows you to control your Mac DVD experience. You can change the viewing size, turn on Closed Captioning, turn on subtitles, pause, stop, rewind, and scan forward or backward with a few strokes of the keyboard or clicks of the mouse. You can navigate to the DVD menu, Title menu, Chapters, add bookmarks for quick access at a later time, and more. It's like having your own dedicated DVD Player in your Mac.

Updates