MacBook Pro - HD DVD Question

Yep. For Christmas I got a 15 inch MBP from my parents. I love it. My old laptop, the DV9000T from HP was able to play HD-DVD movies, but the specs were raised and movies were sluggish. The MBP has a much better graphics card and a more powerful processor.


Here are my questions:

• If I used BootCamp and installed XP on a partition, would I be able to used my HD-DVD 360 drive to play movies? Is the graphics card powerful enough?
• Is there any program on OSX (Leopard) to do this?

 

I'm not too familiar with this part, but the MBP's graphics card will definitely have no problem outputting 1920x1200 on an external display.

 

There is a program on Windows called Cyberlink PowerDvd HD. It can allow you to play HD Movies on a PC. If I connect a 360 HD-DVD drive (it's legal since it runs on USB) to the MBP, it most likely should be able to play. I'm just getting a second opinion.

 

i dont have the hd dvd drive for my 360, so i dont know anything about it. but, if will play hd dvd's on a normal windows computer, then yes it will work with bootcamp. BC is just like running windows natively (if only i got paid for every time i saw that line on this site). or, maybe just look around for an external drive. mac compatible of course.

 

I know what boot-camp is, just wondering if Macbook Pros can play HDDVD'S

 

This is kind of an odd question with no definitive answer.

Some HD-DVD/blu-ray software requires HDCP certified hardware and drivers, whether an external display is used or not.

Some does not.

The DVI output on the MacBook Pro is not not HDCP certified. So you will not be able to use it on an external display if you want to keep things "legal". And, as I said, you might not be able to even play it on the built-in display, depending on the software used.

Currently, theres no way to play HD-DVD or blu-ray in Mac OS X. There is no official support for it, no software for it.. and Apple does not use hardware acceleration for video playback. Even though the GeForce 8 series has full hardware support for many things, like VC-1, H.264, video deblocking, etc. Apple does not take advantage of any of these and relies entirely on the CPU to process video. This is evident by the fact that DVD playback takes as much as 4x the CPU time on OS X as it does in Windows with a modern GPU and current playback software.