Any alternatives to using DVD player for better quality DVD playback?

[iamhulk]

I just bought a new Macbook Pro 13" and popped in a DVD to test out the playback. Nothing is wrong with the DVD player program. It just seems the playback quality is not too great.

Are there any other programs for use with Snow Leopard that will play DVD's better on my Macbook? I've heard VLC is a great alternative but not sure if it actually plays DVD's with better quality.

It just seems that for such a beautiful screen the DVD playback quality kinda sucks.

 

[celticpride678]

Pretty sure all DVD player applications will display the same quality. It's got to do with the disc.

 

[iamhulk]

It's a standard DVD (Slumdog Millionaire) that plays great on a stand alone DVD player. There is nothing wrong with the disc either.

Has anyone ever actually used another program with better results?

 

[Makosuke]

Not sure why something would look any worse with DVD Player than on a standalone player--should actually look better, as DVD Player should do better upscaling interpolation. That said, VLC is free and should take you all of a minute to download, so why not just download it and try? If it looks better, great, if it looks the same, then it's the disc.

Are we talking about skipping here, or just the video looking bad? If the video itself, it's entirely possible you just don't notice it on your TV--you're sitting WAY closer to your computer screen, and the screen is almost certainly of drastically higher quality than your TV, plus it's probably calibrated differently, so it's usually much, much easier to pick out encoding flaws on a computer screen than on a TV.

Entirely possible that's what it is, in which case nothing other than sitting farther away from the screen will fix it.

 

[Darth.Titan]

When you watch a DVD on a computer monitor, bear in mind that your monitor has a much higher resolution than many televisions. Therefore, the software has to artificially increase the resolution of a standard DVD to fill the screen. Because of this, DVDs played on a computer can look sub-par to some eyes.

If you "un-maximize" DVD Player's viewscreen and view the video in a window at its actual size, you will probably notice that the picture looks much sharper.

If you really want to try a different player, try using VLC. It will play DVDs.

 

[iamhulk]

Makes sense. Thanks guys.