[galore]

I just bought my first Apple computer (I guess I am one of those switchers) and am really impressed by almost everything except DVD playback (on a Mac Mini 1.25GHz w/512 MB).

With the Apple DVD player, no matter if in full screen or in a window (and regardless of resolution (tried in 1280x768 and several lower resolutions)), the picture is, well, blurry and jittery. This is especially noticeable in fast moving scenes and gives the impression that each frame is drawn too slow. For example, if the camera pans, the screen is not refreshed in sync with the movie frame rate and the frames appear to be horizontally split (two or more horizontal splits) - this is not interlace-comb-style artifacts but instead 2-3 splits.

Given that on my old 900MHz Athlon PC with an ATI Radeon from several years ago, DVD playback looks perfect, I assumed that this must be a SW problem and of course, using VLC on the Mac Mini doesn't exhibit this problem (too bad VLC is clunky otherwise).

Is this a known issue with Apple's DVD player on G4s with the ATI Radeon 9200 GPU?
If that has occurred on other G4 Macs (I googled but couldn't find anything relevant) was it a driver issue?

Really odd that Apple would ship a DVD player app with Minis with this problem, if it can be fixed in SW (see VLC)?!?!?

Other than that, OSX really kills Windows XP (feels like two generations ahead).

[Krypton]

I'm surprised you're having problems - playback should be silky smooth.

I'm running a 500Mhz G4/16Mb Rage/1x DVD ROM drive and I have no problems at all.

[turtle777]

First of all, welcome to MacNN. I'm sorry for your problems.

You might wanna ask that question in the Software forum, because I don't think this is a hardware related problem.

Send a PM (personal message) to one of the admins (like tooki) and ask them to move the thread.

-t

[mitchell_pgh]

Off of the top of my head, one thing I can think of is you have multiple applications open all at once... perhaps iTunes, iPhoto, etc. etc. other then that, I'm at a loss...

And even that shouldn't really cause such problems.

[RonnieoftheRose]

The first mistake a new Mac OS user makes is in thinking that closing a document window also quits the application. Check your Dock to see if the apps are open (a little black arrow under the icon indicates it is). If too many apps are open then they'll take up all your memory. That could be one reason DVD playback isn't working well.

If that's no the case, reboot the computer and run the DVD Player before you do anything else. If you still have problems, ask to see a DVD playing at an Apple Store. You could have a faulty graphics chip. If you do then have the mini replaced.