No one likes watching movies on a small screen. While my 13inch macbook provides for some crisp resolutions it doesn’t exactly make for a cinematic experience when watching my favourite DVD. To this end I connected my macbook up to my 32inch LCD HDTV but alas I couldn’t at first find a way to display the movie on the television in fullscreen mode - I could only stretch the movie to fit the screen. As always though with a bit of perserverence the answer will present itself to you, and like most things there’s actually no difficulty involved; it’s purely a matter of knowing how…
Physically connecting a macbook to a HDTV (or monitor) is very easy: the macbook has a mini-DVI port, and HDTVs and computer monitors will have either a VGA, or HDMI port, or both. Mini-DVI is a rather inconvienient kind of port as seems to be only used by Apple so is a tad uncommon. Apple sell a way too short mini-DVI to VGA (female) cable; but a male-male VGA cable will complete the connection to you TV / monitor. The macbook automatically detects the second screen and will do whatever internal configurations are necessary to get the display working. It’s then just left up to you to set the resolution within System Preferences -> Displays. Just be sure that ‘Mirror Displays’ in Display -> Arrangement is unclicked (actually you can simply mirror the displays and run the movie in fullscreen on the macbook screen but it’s likely that the resolutions on both screens are not the same so you’ll be left with a border around the movie. Also you may wish to use one screen while playing the movie in the other so it’s best to unclick the ‘Mirror Displays’ option).
Once the second display is set up, open any movie in Quicktime and then go to View -> Present Movie in the menu toolbar. Here you can select which screen you want the movie to play in and at what size you want the movie to ‘Present at’ (probably Full Screen). Hit play and your move should zoom over to your second screen and begin playing - WALA!
Now this will only work while Quicktime is the active window. As soon as you change to another application, say a web browser, Quicktime will revert back to its original window. To get around this go into the quicktime preferences and select the Full Screen tab. At the bottom is the option to ‘Remain in full screen when player is inactive’. Turn this on and then you’ll be free to do anything you want on your macbok while your DVDs play fullscreen in all their glory!
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