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August 19, 2006

video

Apple supporting High Def optical formats? Not quite

Posted Aug. 19, ’06, 9:12 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Video

DVD HDI was watching a DVD on my MacBook last night, and I wanted to see if there was an option for keeping the DVD player on top (that would be mad handy, by the way). I didn’t find that, but I did find a “High Definition” section of Apple’s DVD Player Preferences. It’s divided into two sections: a “Normal Video Size” section, which lets you determine the video size at which standard and high definition content should be played, and a “Hybrid Disc” section.

The latter, of course, sparked my interest. Apple has come out firmly in favor of the Blu-Ray side of the Next Gen Optical Format War, but two things struck me: 1) as far as I know, there are no Blu-Ray hybrid discs; 2) I haven’t yet heard of a Mac-compatible HD DVD drive. I found one reference to the HD capabilities on the page for Tiger’s DVD Player (last blurb on the bottom right) which suggests that it can play back HD DVDs authored by DVD Studio Pro 4.

Opening up the search a little wider found some more information on HD Beat, where the commenters suggest that this is a special feature for handling HD content on a standard DVD disc, which you can create in DVD Studio Pro 4.

My excitement is somewhat evaporated, but I imagine HD support will be coming sooner or later.


2 Comments

Marven Payne said:

It's strange that all of the recent Blu-Ray Drives I see in the Japanese electronics stores are made for Windows and yet Microsoft has sided with HD-DVD, whereas Apple who is a part of the Blu-Ray Consortium, doesn't have support from them. I've only heard of one Blu-Ray Drive thus far that will be released with Mac support (although I haven't seen it yet).

August 19, 2006 4:38 PM
Eric Kiepek said:

WindowShadeX has a "float on top" feature that lets you keep any window in the foreground (only one at a time obviously). I use it all the time to float the DVDPlayer movie on top of word or firefox. VLC Player contains a menu item that lets you float the movie window on top as well, but it only works within VLC, making it less useful than WindowShadeX

August 20, 2006 6:19 PM

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