Steve Jobs has said for some time that Apple will not support Blu-Ray, calling the licensing “a bag of hurt.” Despite how popular Blu-Ray has become since it trounced HD-DVD in the battle of the standards, Jobs claims that downloadable Internet content will eventually win out over physical media. Each format has its pros and cons: having an actual disc means you don’t need an Internet connection to watch video, there’s no waiting time to watch and there is no buffering (i.e. the entire movie grinds to a halt whenever network traffic is bottlenecked). However, having a disc in your hand doesn’t do a lot of good if your chosen device doesn’t have a drive to read it.
Whether you have an iMac, MacBook or an iOS device, if you have an Internet connection, you have access to the iTunes Store, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu or any of a growing list of other online movie sources. You can download and stream video content (even 720p in some cases), eliminating the need for physical media and allowing the content to be easily shared between devices. If you find yourself stuck at an airport because your flight was delayed, it can be quite easy to grab a movie to watch while waiting if the airport has a robust network.
That said, what if you do want to enjoy your library of Blu-Ray disc-based movies on your Mac? Well, it IS possible, but it takes some doing. Warning for the squeamish: this is kinda technical, however you can’t break anything by attempting it.
One of the first things people say in response to “no support” is “but there are Blu-Ray drives available for Mac.” True, but these only support the reading and writing of data. Out of the box, you can use a Blu-Ray burner for data backup, and you can even create a Blu-Ray movie disc to play elsewhere, however there is no software support built directly into OS X to play a Blu-Ray movie disc. Due to licensing issues, there are also no hooks in place for a third-party developer to make a player.
You can, though, use video conversion software to take a movie off a disc and turn it into something that a Mac CAN play. One method uses a program like Handbrake to convert the Blu-Ray movie to a format your Mac can use. Handbrake has many automatic conversions built in, so you can select which one works best for you without needing to know what all the terms mean. The software will even convert directly to iTunes, XBOX 360 or PS3 streaming formats. You’ll need quite a bit of hard disk space to do this, as each movie can take anywhere from 6-12 GB, but it frees you from carrying a disc around and doesn’t require an Internet connection to watch a movie.
The other option is to set up a “streaming server,” though this requires a powerful system. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll point you to an article that accurately explains it and includes pictures. Check it out here. To summarize, you’re using a program called MakeMKV to read the data from the disc and “send” the movie to VLC, which plays the movie on your screen. You actually can use this method to play the movie on a system that doesn’t have a Blu-Ray disc, in which case you would do the “streaming server” part on the system that has the disc and the “watching” part on another system on the same network.
I have to post the following disclaimer: in using any program to “rip” or transcode a commercial media product such as a DVD or Blu-Ray disc, you do so with the understanding that it is for your own personal use, and you agree that you will not sell or hand out copies of said media to all your friends, nor will you upload it to the Internet, etc. That should make the legal team happy…
Of course, you could always install Boot Camp and a full copy of Windows to play your Blu-Ray movies, but that’s an additional cost (on top of the cost of the Blu-Ray drive itself) and requires rebooting your computer to watch the movie. Because the limitation is based on the operating system (not the hardware), using a copy of Windows via Parallels or VMWare is not sufficient to play from a Blu-Ray disc.