When you play DVDs on a mac why is the quality rubbish??

Mine look perfect... my DVDs on the Mac, that is. 😀

Is every DVD you try the same? Are they PAL or NTSC disks?
There's no reason why they should look worse than tapes... ick.

applemax said:

I'm in the UK so they're PAL. The lines at the top are all jaggedy. It looks horrid

Click to expand...

What Mac do you have?

EDIT: It pays to read sigs, lol.

Hmmmm... Call Apple and see if you can get a replacement drive.

There are tricks to take screenshots of onscreen dvd playback. Take a screenshot and post it here so we know what you're talking about.

There are probably two things at work here. Have you ever watched DVD's on a computer before (not just a Mac). Whenever you watch a DVD on a high resolution computer display, DVD's will ALWAYS look bad because they are upscaled and thus blurred to hell. Try playing the DVD at its original size in OSX. Does it still look blurry? If not, thats because that is the DVD's true resolution. Yes, DVD's are very low resolution, which is why it will be pretty small on your screen.

The reason DVD's look better on your TV is because televisions are low resolution displays and interlaced, so the TV "hides" a lot of the imperfections of the DVD. Try plugging your DVD player into a nice shiny new LCD High Definition TV, and I guarantee you that it will look just as blurry as on your Mac.