VideoLan, developers of the popular (and free) VLC video player, announced that their 2.0 version for OS X will have some exciting new features. It will use an interface similar to iTunes, have a full-screen mode in Lion, and if you have the right hardware, allow unprotected Blu-ray playback.
OS X has no built-in Blu-ray support—you can’t just connect a Blu-ray drive to your Mac and play movies on it. You have always been able to use a Blu-ray drive for data storage, and you can create a Blu-ray movie disc on a Mac, you just can’t play it back without using a different device. There have been other attempts at Blu-ray playback, but so far none have been reliable. Mac Blu-ray Player touts itself as “the first universal media player for Mac and PC in the world,” but reviews for it are anything but positive.
VLC has been known for years as THE cross-platform player. No matter what you try to play, VLC “just works.” QuickTime, Windows Media, MKV, and even movies with subtitles are supported. Now they are adding Blu-ray support to the list, making it the complete solution.
Update! When this article was written, VLC was still in beta. Last Friday, VLC released version 2.0.0. Note that the Blu-ray support is listed as “experimental” (menus are currently disabled) but the basic support is there. Good news all around—it has better integration with Lion but still supports Leopard and PPC users.