BribieG Posted April 18, 2007 Posted April 18, 2007 Have never bothered watching DVDs on my laptop as the sound is tinny (built in speakers) but just acquired a reasonable set of headphones so tried out a dvd, found a suitable screen res. and fired up Windows Media Player. When selecting 'full screen' option, after a couple of seconds the menu bars etc disappear and the picture fills the screen (or letterboxed in the case of some of the movies). No problem. However WMP only appears to give you one shot at this, if you accidentally move the mouse or change any of the settings such as the volume, then the menus, toobars, side bars etc come back and the picture won't go back to full screen again. Hardly worth the effort. Any decent freeware dvd players out there?
bresmith Posted April 18, 2007 Posted April 18, 2007 I think you can right click and then choose full screen again. Or there is an icon down the bottom right hand side that will take you to full screen. It will do it, trust me.
jakes Posted April 18, 2007 Posted April 18, 2007 Any decent freeware dvd players out there? You could try Media Player Classic(although I'm not sure how it handles full screen), if you want to stick with a Windows Media Player feel. I'm quite partial to VLC myself. Although I use the Mac version, I assume the Windows version is similar, you should have right click access to a menu to control volume etc, and while moving the mouse while playing will bring up a progress bar while playing, it goes away a few seconds later. VLC is also very good for playing a very wide variety of media types if you have this need. There may be others, but VLC does everything that I need it to.
50mxe20 Posted April 18, 2007 Posted April 18, 2007 (edited) Media Player Classic?? Edit: Jakes pipped me by a minute (or less). Edited April 18, 2007 by Lyle
abdelrm Posted April 18, 2007 Posted April 18, 2007 Have never bothered watching DVDs on my laptop as the sound is tinny (built in speakers) but just acquired a reasonable set of headphones so tried out a dvd, found a suitable screen res. and fired up Windows Media Player. When selecting 'full screen' option, after a couple of seconds the menu bars etc disappear and the picture fills the screen (or letterboxed in the case of some of the movies). No problem.However WMP only appears to give you one shot at this, if you accidentally move the mouse or change any of the settings such as the volume, then the menus, toobars, side bars etc come back and the picture won't go back to full screen again. Hardly worth the effort. Any decent freeware dvd players out there? To stop this from happening go back to WMP and do the following: click on; Tools > Options > Performance tab > Advanced > view the screen capture attached to make sure they are the same as yours for better viewing experience Video Acceleration Settings
BribieG Posted April 18, 2007 Author Posted April 18, 2007 Thanks guys, p.perfect: changed settings for WMP, and it is now obedient! jakes: downloaded VLC for windows. However, I'm running my screen on 1280 x 800. When I try to play a DVD fullscreen it is displayed by Windows Media Player 'gutterboxed' with black borders top, bottom and both sides so I have to change res. to tv-like 1280 * 768 which gives me more or less tv like picture. Something odd going on here because both horizontal resolutions are 1280. However, VLC somehow seems to detect best res for the DVD and the movie displays fullscreen no matter what res I am running! Clever little program! It's also popped its icon into the 'auto start' box that comes up when I insert a DVD so will certainly be using VLC. Thanks again
jakes Posted April 18, 2007 Posted April 18, 2007 Thanks guys, p.perfect: changed settings for WMP, and it is now obedient! jakes: downloaded VLC for windows. However, I'm running my screen on 1280 x 800. When I try to play a DVD fullscreen it is displayed by Windows Media Player 'gutterboxed' with black borders top, bottom and both sides so I have to change res. to tv-like 1280 * 768 which gives me more or less tv like picture. Something odd going on here because both horizontal resolutions are 1280. However, VLC somehow seems to detect best res for the DVD and the movie displays fullscreen no matter what res I am running! Clever little program! It's also popped its icon into the 'auto start' box that comes up when I insert a DVD so will certainly be using VLC. Thanks again Glad to hear it's working for you
BribieG Posted April 18, 2007 Author Posted April 18, 2007 Also, glad to hear that VLC is available for Mac because I have absolutely no desire to migrate to Vista so my next desktop will almost certainly be a Mac However current laptop is only a year old so it will have to wait its turn. Quite off topic but while we have a maccie on line, is it true that there is a version of mac OS that will run on a PC? Performance penalties?
Owen Posted April 18, 2007 Posted April 18, 2007 Current Macs use Intel hardware, just like a PC. You can run Windows on a Mac and OSX on a PC, both in native mode with no performance penalty if you have the right hardware. PC notebooks are available with better graphics systems then Mac notebooks and therefore should have advantages for video if the driver support is available. If HTPC use is important Windows is the way to go for best quality and performance.
jakes Posted April 18, 2007 Posted April 18, 2007 Current Macs use Intel hardware, just like a PC.You can run Windows on a Mac and OSX on a PC, both in native mode with no performance penalty if you have the right hardware. PC notebooks are available with better graphics systems then Mac notebooks and therefore should have advantages for video if the driver support is available. If HTPC use is important Windows is the way to go for best quality and performance. While it's true from a technical standpoint that it's possible to run OS X on a PC (since current macs use intel chips), it's actually against Apple's licensing to run OS X on non-Apple hardware. What this means from a practical point of view is that it's not possible to buy a stand alone copy of OS X - it only comes installed on Apple computers. (I believe it is possible to get hacked versions of OS X that will run on generic hardware, but I don't know anything about how well it works, and it's not strictly legal since you can't buy OS X for this purpose). Owen is right about better graphics on PC notebooks, many of the lower-end apple systems use only intel integrated graphics chips, rather than 3d cards from nvidia or ati, but for watching DVDs or desktop work they're fine (pretty useless for 3d gaming though).
tomohawk Posted April 18, 2007 Posted April 18, 2007 Yep, VLC on the Mac is wonderful. Though I do like QuickTime Pro as well. Just depends what I'm watching. I have heard some moderatley reliable 'rumours' from a friend at Apple Australia (No idea how accurate it really is, and i'm not all that hopeful), but apparently Apple may be considering releasing a version of OS X 10.5 Leopard that will run on a generic PC with components from a specific list (probably matching the Mac lineup.. presumably these components would be expensive and thus not make installing on the PC a 'cheap' option).
DEMONDOCTOR Posted April 18, 2007 Posted April 18, 2007 I know you've already resolved it but i'll say this anyway... in the default settings for WMP once you've gone full screen (alt+enter) moving the mouse will make the controls appear but they will go away again in a few seconds UNLESS the mouse is hovering over the control bar... easy to fix... just move the mouse upward and wait (thats with the default settings anyway)
Owen Posted April 18, 2007 Posted April 18, 2007 Yep, VLC on the Mac is wonderful. Though I do like QuickTime Pro as well. Just depends what I'm watching. I have heard some moderatley reliable 'rumours' from a friend at Apple Australia (No idea how accurate it really is, and i'm not all that hopeful), but apparently Apple may be considering releasing a version of OS X 10.5 Leopard that will run on a generic PC with components from a specific list (probably matching the Mac lineup.. presumably these components would be expensive and thus not make installing on the PC a 'cheap' option). Actually Mac notebooks use cheap integrated Intel chip sets as used in low end PC notebooks from the likes of Dell, HP, Compaq and many others. The better PC notebooks use better and more expensive components than any Mac notebook. Although you can run either Windows or OSX on most notebooks (legally or otherwise), OSX is not the best choice for a HTPC. The advanced deinterlacing and other functions available on high end ATI and nVidia hardware is not supported on OSX as far as I know. VLC also does not support these functions, and is only a basic software player. If all you watch is progressive (film) sourced DVD’s or HD almost anything will work, but if you watch true interlaced 480i, 576i SD or 1080i, VLC is woefully inadequate as are all the software only solutions.
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