Blu-ray reading/writing software

Bootcamp

It depends on what you want to do, but Bluray support on macs is minimal to none. Your best bet is Bootcamp if you want to play protected discs. There are no real commercial players on OSX. There is VLC for unprotected Bluray discs, and not to knock the guys that work on it but I find VLC's video quality just OK. I would stay away from the "Bluray" players for OSX that you see -- AFAIK they are just bad rehashes of open source stuff and won't do better than VLC.

If you want to author or back up to Blurays, you should be able to use most commercial burning/authoring SW. But that doesn't sound like what you want from your question.

OSX is just not friendly to Bluray from a playback standpoint, take this from someone who has had blurays in his mac for at least 7 years. Your choices are Bootcamp, ripping (I won't go into this), or getting a stand alone BD player. I use a standalone BD player because I got tired of Bootcamp.

I might suggest you return the drive if possible.

 

OSX will mount blu-rays just fine, playing with them does not work in OSX though so you need to resort to third party software.

For writing toast is the best program so far as unfortunately iDVD only works with, well, DVDs. At the moment you need to buy a blu-ray plugin for toast but if it does not come with your package you can get it off their site for like 30 bucks.

For reading the best option is called Blu-ray Player. It will not give you the menus but you have access to everything else. Be warned support is minimal but it works for me so I have never needed to contact them. It is in the under 50 dollar category.

OWC has a quick guide to using blu-rays with macs on their site. It goes into a bit more details than that but those are the programs.

http://blog.macsales.com/10779-blu-ray-and-macs-with-owc-yes

http://blog.macsales.com/12010-play-blu-ray-movies-on-your-mac-without-converting-them-first

http://eshop.macsales.com/articles/howto-burn-bluray-toast

 

http://www.macblurayplayer.com/

 

There is no native support for BluRay in Windows either.

Watch a BluRay movie: Mac BluRay player
Rip a protected BluRay: PavTube (or any of it's kind just pick your interface)
Burn a BluRay: Toast 10 and up

 

It only needs to be connected if it still contains DRM. Your own or ripped BluRay's will play fine with VLC.

 

You can just rip the DRM of protected Blue ray disks; you bought the movie, you should be able to play it how you want to!

 

Given there are at least three oddly very similar looking BD players for the Mac, I'm having a hard time finding reviews/comparisons. What is says earlier in this thread about no commercial players is/was not true. I just bought the Hobbit 3D Blu-Ray Combo pack (3D version , 2D version, DVD and Ultraviolet for $17; kind of makes the iTunes version seem like crap, eh?) and while I wanted to convert it for iTunes so I could watch it on AppleTV (even 1st Gen) and this was not difficult to achieve, I noticed VLC could not play these newer discs, but upon trying out the trial/free versions of Aurora, MacGo BD Player and Mac Blu-Ray Player, it's obvious they all now support menus (didn't the last time I looked at them) along with up to 7.1 DTS-MasterHD output if your Mac has HDMI output. One of them (MacGo product) even has an Air-play like output (AirX) to send it to your iPad/iPhone. One (Free Mac Blu-Ray Player) has no trial/timed/annoying text limitations to the free version, but doesn't output 5.1 or higher, true 1080p, etc. on the free version, but at least gives you a basic player to try out for extended periods or if you don't need any of those features (i.e. just to play on your notebook or whatever). The free player one doesn't seem to be updated to ML/Mavericks full-screen modes (it has a full screen mode, but not the little corner-arrow method) while clearly the MacGo product does have Mavericks full-screen mode (plus that AirX) feature. The non-free version of the free player, however comes in the cheapest if you buy it within a day with the attached coupon at only $35. I think MacGo is $40. Aurora is $55 for a two computer license (I can't say I like the idea of them limiting how many of my Macs I can use it on given I'm not going to view more than one at a time). It's hard to say which ones will live up to "lifetime" guarantees. Who knows if any of them will work with Blu-Rays made 5 years from now or whatever if their company goes under or what not given they keep updating the protection methods.

The DVDFab Blu-Ray player is also available now and it promises constant updates to keep working with newer movies and seems to have full features as well ($50). Sadly, I was unwilling to try their player out since it's a .PKG format and wants to install god knows what on my computer (and will I be able to easily remove it again?) while all the other players are simple drag/drop applications.

I've also been trying to find a good ripper for converting to AppleTV format. MakeMKV does a nice job, but it's got a 30-day trial limitation and cost a whopping $50 with absolutely no output controls for the result (i.e. if you want an AppleTV or iPhone version, you'll still need something like Handbrake on top of it and MORE time).

DVDFab has a lot more options and can do about everything, it seems. It's also priced just outside the stratosphere, IMO. $299 for an everything-lifetime version. No thanks. I'm not buying Final Cut Pro here. I just want to have a hard drive, server based whole-house viewing system. Suddenly, the $50 fee for MakeMKV plus Handbrake doesn't seem so unreasonable (reivews indicate DVDFab isn't very fast encoding either, not that Hanbrake is lightning fast; even on my quad-i7, it still on average takes perhaps about 30-50% of the playing time of a given movie for a typical HD encode.

Basically, there's a lot of options and none of them are standing out as leaps and bounds better than the others. I'm looking for better information myself without having to spend a tone of time playing with them. It'd be nice if a review site put them all through their paces with the current versions (not ancient reviews from over a year ago when there was no menus, 7.1 support, etc.)