
Mac OS X: If your iMac or MacBook doubles as your portable DVD player, you'll find the usually un-skip-able trailers, advertisements, and piracy warnings not just time wasting, but battery draining. Get ultimate control of your DVDs with this unofficial software patch.

Apple, like most DVD makers, has to license its DVD decoding software from the big movie firms, and part of that license requires that it honor user operation prohibitions, or UOPs. Those UOPs include things like trailers that can't be skipped, warnings that stick around for far too long, and even advertisements on a DVD you paid for. On a standard DVD player, we've found that stop-stop-play often works, but that trick doesn't quite fly on most software DVD players.


With this DVD Player Patch, your drive ignores UOPs, so you can skip ahead of trailers, fast forward through other content, and switch audio tracks or subtitle languages at any point in your movie. It's a shell script that's very respectful of your system files, making backups of the files and apps it changes, and making sure it's patching properly with checksums before getting to work. Run it once, and your DVD Player app should no longer be a slave to shoddy commerce tactics.

This patch is a free download for Mac OS X systems only. It seems to support most Mac configurations, but if your DVD Player doesn't improve, you can provide feedback for future compatibility.

DVD Player patch [via Hack A Day]