Yesterday’s Feature Presentation took a look at the new Front Row in Leopard, which provides a simple, media-center like way to view your music, your TV shows, your movies, your podcasts, your photo slideshows, and your DVDs, things that you could already do just fine with already built-in apps on your computer like iTunes, iPhoto, and DVD Player. Although I did lavish praise yesterday on the new Front Row for being a lot better than the old Front Row, the mere fact that these applications already exist and already work with the Apple Remote really means that the Front Row’s simpler interface and mind-boggling graphics are the only thing keeping it from fading into non-importance. Indeed, in the case of DVDs, Leopard’s DVD Player includes numerous new features that probably help to rank it among the most advanced DVD players out there.

Apple’s Leopard features page attributes ten of its over 300 so-called features to DVD Player, and while I haven’t been able to test all of them, and some of them I should just take for granted, they’re still pretty nice. Regardless, when you watch a DVD on a computer, you get one universal advantage: a mouse. Although you could certainly use an Apple Remote or the little mini player thing to do the normal browsing through menus with the up/down/left/right arrows, wouldn’t it be easier to use your mouse to point and click to the menu item that you want? And in DVD Player for Leopard, Apple allows you to make even better use of the mouse. In both the window and full screen modes, DVD Player gives you a time slider, just like in iTunes, so the very spot of your movie that you want to be at is just a mouse drag away.

Mac OS X’s full screen mode in DVD Player wasn’t that great before, and Front Row was probably the better place to go to get a nice full-screen DVD viewing interface. Not anymore, as Leopard’s DVD Player gives you on-screen controls, and even some never-before seen things. Mouse down to the bottom of the screen and up pop the controls for your movie. You can even turn on closed captioning from there, and open some of the other features that I’m about to talk about, right in full screen view. Mouse up to the top of the screen, and you get a list of every chapter in your movie, so you can quickly jump around without stopping the movie. As the movie plays, DVD Player adds a thumbnail of the chapter up there as well. My only qualm about navigating chapters in that way is that you can’t see the chapter name, but that probably isn’t possible considering how DVDs are formatted.

If you’re in full screen mode, DVD Player provides a new zoom console. If you turn on Video Zoom and then click on the Auto Zoom button, DVD Player will automatically resize the video to remove the pillarbox or letterbox on the movie so that it completely fills your computer’s screen. Of course, you can also manually edit the zoom of the movie as well, although be careful that you don’t start distorting your movie in weird ways.

Apple’s site says that DVD Player also has something called Time Skip that lets you skip ahead or skip back for five seconds, although I would personally think that the time slider is sufficient for doing that. But whatever, I don’t make the features. Apple also claims that DVD Player includes Scratched Disc Recovery, which is smart enough to locate and avoid scratched areas of a disc. While this does sound like a really cool feature, I didn’t have enough nerve to scratch up one of our DVDs to find out how well it worked, so I’ll take Apple’s word for it.

All in all, Leopard’s DVD Player brings a number of new features to the table that rival many other computer DVD programs and any set-top box. Of course, the natural downside would be that you don’t get to watch your DVDs on that big, humongous, has-a-diagonal-length-that’s-twice-as-long-as-your-kid’s-height television on that couch that provides so little back support that you’ll likely need acupuncture within the next six months. However, for when you are interested in a little entertainment while you’re in front of your Mac, DVD Player offers a number of new ways to enjoy it, at least until the Apple TV gets its own slot-load DVD drive.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: chapters, DVD Player, entertainment, features, full screen, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, movies, review