MacBook DVD playback quality

I was playing with my new MacBook tonight to get the feel of post OS8.6 “Macness”. It’s going to be a joy to explore one of the best collections of shareware I’ve ever seen.

I did notice that my DVD playback had poor aliasing or “jaggies” (full screen) compared to my current pc notebook. This is no big deal but curious if anyone compared the Mac book pro DVD quality between respective notebooks. The MBpros and my E-1705 have better GPU’s s that should aid in full motion video playback. I’ll dig around to check for payback software sort of like Power DVD for the pc.

All in all I can’t wait to get back into the Mac swing of things and digging around the low level OS to see what’s changed.

Cheers

 

I have personally never noticed anything, other than the loss in quality when scaling the DV PAL DVD to 1680x1050 on my external monitor connected to my Macbook.
Graphics cards these days make very little difference in DVD playback.
Are you using OS X's DVD Player.app to playback your DVDs? I know that software like VLC player allow you to change interlacing modes, which might get rid of the 'jagged edges'.

 

Yes, I was using OS X's player. I'll give VLC a shot later in the week. I was using the movie "The Contract" as a test. There is a huge difference in scaling and aliasing between both my notebooks. My 1705 has the 1920x1200, native format, so I use a smaller screen for sharpest picture on pc and the Mac. There is also a slight stutter in the Mac playback compared to my Nvidia based machine.

As you say I really don’t have that much an idea on how the pure video technology is used as I see no difference when switching between hardware or software rendering for video on the pc.

I really like the new Mac. I’ll get around to tweaking it in the future. It’s a relief from not having to deal with the Extension Manager! I spent a huge amount of time getting a lean mean fast OS 8.6 that was stable on my old G3.

Cheers

 

Unfortunately, theres no kind way to say that DVD Player just flat out sucks.

It has lots of issues and its missing a ton of features compared to Windows DVD Players.

For example, it doesn't seem to do proper re-sampling of the image. It just seems to stretch it out to the screen resolution rather than properly re-sample and upscale to the proper resolution. Hence the reason you're seeing what you see, such as aliasing.

Another thing is that it lacks any kind of power saving features. For example, WinDVD will cache the DVD to the RAM and spin the disc down. That saves a tremendous amount of battery life.

One feature that it really lacks is LFE decoding. It won't put out the LFE (Subwoofer) channel of 5.1 soundtracks over headphones or to speaker sets less than 5.1, or through an external decoder. WinDVD and the like have been doing this for as long as I can remember now. That definitely has a huge impact on sound quality. If you're like me and listen on headphones, Apple's DVD player sounds flat and weak. But WinDVD, etc. all push that LFE channel through with the down-mixed 2 channel track, so the bass is all there and.. well, it sounds good. DVD Player in OS X has an EQ, but it still can't make up for the lack of LFE decoding.

The list goes on really. I like my MacBook and OS X, but DVD Player is lacking to the point where its unusable.

Honestly, you could throw Windows on your MacBook and install something like WinDVD or PowerDVD or Theatertek. The image and sound quality would be a night and day difference. You'll be surprised just how different your DVDs look on the same hardware.

Thankfully, DVD Player in Leopard has seen some huge improvements in image quality (at least when I used it). But it still has a ways to go to catch up to Windows DVD players. I don't recall seeing an option to enable LFE over headphones or speakers less than 5.1 channels.

DVD playback is the only area where Windows does outperform OS X.

I love movies, so I actually keep XP installed just for that.

 

I feel your pain. OS X and movie lovers just don't go well together.