Um, without the computer on . . .? That's . . . not even possible.
In theory you could power up just the DVD-drive, graphics card, display, and IR port, but that'd add a lot of dedicated circuitry for the decoding and once you do that, it's not worth it in my mind. All you're saving is the HDD and processor and RAM in the rare instances when you want to watch a DVD but not use your laptop.
Not to mention that with a slot-loading drive, you have to power the computer on, put in the DVD, and then power it off.
What difference does it make if the computer has to be turned on, anyway? Macs take less than 30 seconds to reboot nowadays, so what's the big deal? (Assuming the concern is the time).
That's what bugs me about the people complaining to restart their computer to boot into a different OS using the BETA (ahem) of BootCamp. Running it on a mac would probably take less time to restart into Windows and load the program than it does just to load the program on a PC.
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Um, without the computer on . . .? That's . . . not even possible.
In theory you could power up just the DVD-drive, graphics card, display, and IR port, but that'd add a lot of dedicated circuitry for the decoding and once you do that, it's not worth it in my mind. All you're saving is the HDD and processor and RAM in the rare instances when you want to watch a DVD but not use your laptop.
Not to mention that with a slot-loading drive, you have to power the computer on, put in the DVD, and then power it off.
That's what bugs me about the people complaining to restart their computer to boot into a different OS using the BETA (ahem) of BootCamp. Running it on a mac would probably take less time to restart into Windows and load the program than it does just to load the program on a PC.