THE FOLLOWING is not necessarily aimed at our regular readers, but at people trolling the search engines in need of a particular piece of help:

When you’re trying to play a DVD movie in MacOS 9, and the Apple DVD Player software only gives you a blank screen and occasional split-seconds of sound, your computer might be mistaking the disc for one of a different format.

To solve this, try the following sequence:

• Launch Apple DVD Player before inserting the disc.
• Simultaneously press the logistically difficult but possible combination of the Command, Option, and I keys with one hand.
• Re-insert the disc with the other hand.

This will make MacOS read the disc in the “ISO” rather than the “UDF” format, and should make many previously Mac-unfriendly DVDs play without any further hitch.

If that doesn’t work, open your Extensions folder to make sure it contains only one system extension with “Volume Access” in its name. And make sure you have the current version of DVD Player (2.7 for OS 9, 3.1 for OSX).