Can you play DVD-A discs on a MacBook Pro?


Gang,

I've just added a Musical Fidelity M1DAC and a MF V-Link USB-to-SPDIF converter to my rig, so I can upgrade my CD player and output music from my MacBook Pro to my rig. But can I also play DVD-A discs from my laptop? My impression is that you cannot, because of the encryption on DVD-A discs. But then I've seen online that VLC media player will play them? What's the deal?
rebbi
Rebbi, while I'm not a Mac user I have used DVDAE to perform the same process on a PC and the results are excellent. I don't believe that there is any loss of fidelity in that the software simply extracts the digital data and outputs it in the selected format without any compression or other manipulation. As always though, YMMV.
Bill_k,

Thanks for the tip .... looks interesting. I wonder what if any quality is lost in the ripping process with that software.
While this won't allow you to play DVD-A discs directly on a Mac, you could use software like DVD Audio Extractor which is available for the Mac OS. It extracts the audio tracks to WAV files which can then be played on a Mac. Hope that this helps!