In a jitter detection apparatus, a playback RF signal 3 detected from an optical disc medium 1 is subjected to waveform shaping, and thereafter, converted into a digital RF signal 6 with a sampling clock having a cycle twice as long as a cycle of a channel clock. Thereafter, an offset variation in a high-frequency band is corrected by an offset correction circuit 9, and data which are missing in the time direction are restored by a Nyquist interpolation filter 23. Then, positions where jitter is to be extracted are selected from an output signal of the Nyquist interpolation filter 23, by a jitter detection preprocessing circuit 28, according to the playback speed of the optical disc medium 1 and the arithmetic capacity of a digital signal operation circuit 29, whereby highly accurate jitters can be extracted by using the digital signal operation circuit 29.