So, I was working on my G4 running Leopard and just for kicks I decided to watch a little bit of a movie on DVD. I rarely do this but I was in the mood to try something different (and, besides, I had not tested the new Leopard DVD Player yet). So I popped in an episode of The Sopranos. The DVD mounted on the desktop as usual with Tiger, but then, nothing. Usually, at least in every operating system up until Mac OS X Leopard, the Apple DVD Player would start up by itself and start playing the movie. So, I thought I would just start up the DVD Player manually to watch my movie. So I went to the Applications folder but it wasn’t there! So I thought maybe Apple moved it to the Utilities folder. Nope, it was still AWOL. So I fired up the new and improved Spotlight search and looked for it. I found aliases to my old player (which was removed during the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard), but there as no Apple DVD Player on my system at all! Where did it go?
I started to do some research online and found the general requirements for Leopard that says that you need a “Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867 MHz or faster) processor.” However, digging deeper I discovered that Apple DVD Player 5 (Leopard version) requires a “1.6GHz processor or faster for improved deinterlacing.”
So, I have a machine with dual 1.25GHz processors, 1.5GB of RAM, that I spent $129 upgrading, which had previously played movies just fine, which now can’t play a DVD movie!! In fact, this ridiculous requirement flies in the face of logic. The previous version of the Apple DVD Player that shipped with Tiger only requires a G3 or later CPU – no mention of any minimum required clock speed, so it probably works okay on 350 MHz G3 Macs, which are the slowest officially supported by Tiger.
But there are always hacks and workarounds! I downloaded a copy of Pacifist, which is a wonderful utility for dealing with Apple installer packages. With Pacifist, I was able to extract the Apple DVD Player from the Leopard Install DVD and install it on my G4. So now I have a working copy of the Apple DVD Player on my Mac. And even though I might not be able to play a full screen video and add transparency to it while moving it to a second monitor (who cares), at least I can watch a movie from Blockbuster!
vince
Thanks for the info Dean. I’m sure I would have encountered this at some point and it would have made me nuts trying to figure it out. The DVD switcheroo by Apple is one of those Leopard solutions waiting for a problem. Like how they took away the Dock functionality where you could right-click a folder and get a nice, cascading menu of items in the folder. Oh well, onward and upward!