Blu-ray quality on rMBP?

I'm not sure there's really a question to be answered. BluRay quality is BluRay quality. The fact that a rMBP has a screen greater than 1080p doesn't get you any more quality than if you ripped it on a cMBP. There's no difference in the resulting quality of the movie file, just what you see on the screen.

And, yes, BluRay is far superior to iTunes HD in terms of quality. There's no comparison.

iThinkergoiMac said:

I'm not sure there's really a question to be answered. BluRay quality is BluRay quality. The fact that a rMBP has a screen greater than 1080p doesn't get you any more quality than if you ripped it on a cMBP. There's no difference in the resulting quality of the movie file, just what you see on the screen.

And, yes, BluRay is far superior to iTunes HD in terms of quality. There's no comparison.

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None at all.

A shame apple wants to deny users that ability

PDFierro said:

Yeah, I know it's still going to be 1080p. Retina doesn't change that. But seeing as the rMBP has a really good IPS display, I figured the picture would look pretty impressive.

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Right. So your question amounts to "Since the rMBP has a better screen, will things on it look better than on the cMBP?" It should look very impressive indeed.

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thehustleman said:

None at all.

A shame apple wants to deny users that ability

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To look at the flip side, all of the HDCP crap doesn't need to be dealt with. It doesn't bother me too much since I rarely watch videos on my MBP anyway. I might consider getting a BD drive for backing up the videos I own, but that's about it.

I've used MKV to rip a number of BRD's. They can then be played using VLC or encoded for iPad, ATV etc using Handbrake...As far as quality goes, the straight rip from MKV although the file sizes are huge...( 20GB + for an average movie) the quality is a little better, but not so much that you's want to keep them that way.

I tried playing a Blu-Ray ISO (~25GB file) in VLC on my 15" rMBP.

Image quality is impressive. It's hard to find a video played in full screen on a rMBP and see absolutely no compression artifact, but it was the case here.

Obiously, the image wasn't as sharp as it could have been given that 1080p is significantly less than 2880x1800, but there was still a noticeable difference compared to other 1080p sources like streaming or iTunes downloads.

However, I did it just out of curiosity. I rarely watch movies alone and rather watch them on an actual TV than on a laptop. I don't plan to do it again, especially since Blu-Ray ISOs are huge and watching a movie on a laptop on your laps in even worse if you need to have an attached external hard drive on top of it .