Playing Blu-ray movies on Mac OS X

"Bluray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD - like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats."

"No, free, instant gratification and convenience (likely in that order) is what made the downloadable formats take off. And the downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes) so storing purchased movies or TV shows is not an issue.

I think you may be wrong - we may see a fast broad move to streamed free and rental content at sufficient quality (at least 720p) to win almost everyone over."

When some Mac user emailed Steve Jobs about Blu-ray playback on Mac, he got the reply from Apple's CEO as above. As the one who ended the era of CDs, Jobs has enough reasons to deny drive-based disc. However, itunes is not always the best choice. We need Blu-ray, but sometimes these discs are really annoying -- they are deposited everywhere around in your house and covered in scratches.

"Hey man, I got a mac and is there anyway to integrate these data into my hard disk?"

Yes, there is, conditional.

First you need an external Blu-ray drive -- Apple never provides this on any Mac, no matter MBP, MBA, iMac or Mac Pro. Go get one on Amazon, Best Buy, eBay or etc. IMPORTANT: Make sure the BD drive can be supported by Mac OS X. In other words, confirm that the manufacturer provides the driver of the hardware for Mac OS X.

Tether your drive with a USB cable and load your Blu-ray disc. If you have prepared your hardware correctly, you should see the disc loaded. Nonetheless, you are just able to browse the files on the disc and still a bit far from playing movies on Mac OS X because Apple has not been officially authorized to play used Blu-ray discs.

I recommend Pavtube ByteCopy for Mac for you to copy and pack those .m2ts files(the original file extension in Blu-ray disc) into an mkv file. Mkv is a superior container for almost any format of video, audio and subtitle. Download or purchase the software on the website and install it. Just a few clicks and then wait until bytecopy finish the lossless conversion -- usually it takes no longer than one or two hours.

OK, let's start playback the converted mkv movie. VLC is an excellent player for the job. Just download it and install -- it's totally free and small in size. Also if you prefer using Quicktime, install pluggin perian -- free as well.

Now, enjoy yourself.

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