how to disable dvd player

[childoflights]

My son is using his computer to watch dvd movies. We do not allow television or any video watching in his room without parental guidance. Is there any way to password protect his use of the dvd player in his computer or must I physically remove the hardware?

 

[Moof1904]

The Parental Controls in Leopard are supposed to be rather robust. Under Leopard (10.5), the Parental Controls may allow application-specific restriction, I don't know. If so, you could just use Leopard's Parental Controls to deactivate the DVD player application.

If Leopard doesn't (or if you're not running Leopard), you could just create a non-admin account for your son to use and delete the DVD player application from the Mac. As a non-admin user, he couldn't install any applications, so he wouldn't be able to play a DVD.

Doing it this way, as opposed to removing or deactivating the drive somehow, would ensure that the DVD drive would still be useable as a means of reading data or backing up data.