By Brian Peat
11/30/03

Many times during a presentation you need to show video clips, and sometimes those clips are delivered to you via DVD. Up to this point, using the DVD player on the Mac was a pain, since you had to run in mirrored mode and that meant messing with your settings DURING your presentation. The other options were to use a real DVD player (meaning you had to switch your projector into SVHS mode), or you had to illegally hack the DVD to get the video files out of it.

With the release of DVD Player 4.0, which is included in Mac OS X 10.3, you can now display a DVD on screen two (the projector), turn off the status messages so you never see Play or Pause printed on the screen, and you can even save bookmarks so you can cue your material on the fly.

The only requirements are 10.3 installed on your Mac, and the ability to do TRUE dual screen mode, which means you can't do this on the iBook, iMac or eMac.

Setting your prefs
The first things that needs to be done is change your preferences so that the audience never sees the DVD window edges, and so they never see the status messages the DVD player normally shows when you click a button.

Launch the DVD Player and choose Preferences from the DVD Player menu. There are two settings we'll deal with. The first is the Full screen mode. Click on the Full Screen icon and turn ON the setting for "Remain in full screen when DVD Player is inactive."

This keeps the player running in full screen when you switch back to Keynote. Otherwise you'd see the DVD window when you click off the player.

Next click on the Windows icon and turn OFF the "Display status information" setting.

This setting hides those status messages so the audience never notices when you decide to pause the movie.

Setting up for actual playback
Now that your preferences are set, you need to set up the player to display the DVD only on screen two (your projector). First, you need to move the Viewer window over onto the projector screen. Get it entirely OFF your main screen, or it might end up displaying on screen one, and you don't want that. Then, turn on the Full Screen mode by going to the Video menu and choosing Full Screen.

Test it out
At this point, if your DVD isn't already playing, click the Play button on the DVD controller palette. If the palette isn't showing, hit the Escape key and it should appear. If you only have one clip, you can cue the clip up and hit the space bar to pause the movie. The DVD Player will stay there, waiting for you to return, even if you launch Keynote and run a presentation.

Using it with Keynote
Just Hit the Escape key in Keynote to stop the show, and the DVD Player will appear behind it. Click on the play button on the DVD Controller and it should play. When you are done, click the pause button, Click back on your keynote window, make sure the correct slide is selected in the Slide navigator and click the Play button in Keynote.

Going a step further with Bookmarks
If you are using more than one clip on the same DVD, you can set "Bookmarks" that mark the start of each clip. Simply click Command-= while it's playing or choose Add Bookmark from the Controls menu.

You will be prompted to name the clip so that it can be identified in the future. Once you have all your Bookmarks done, you can choose ANY clip from the Go menu while the DVD player is running.

Simply choose the clip name and the DVD Player will start playing it, even if the clip you want is on a different section of the disc than you are currently in. If you find you need to edit your bookmarks, you can choose Edit Bookmarks from the Controls menu.

Conclusion
Apple has finally come through for use with a powerful DVD Player that can handle the type of content today's presenters need. Hopefully this tutorial will bring this down to a level that anyone can use.