BluRay Drive?

[Cameront9]

Is there an external USB-C (or USB A, I guess, though I'd prefer C) Blu-Ray drive that I could use with my Macbook Air? I'm not really looking to rip anything, I just want to be able to play some BluRay discs Really I'm looking for something like Apple's external SuperDrive, but capable of playing BluRays.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

To do what you are describing requires two components: the physical optical drive and the Blu-ray player software.

The first is easy. Just buy whatever suits your fancy/budget from Amazon, etc. Optical drives have been commodity components for well over a decade, it doesn't matter which brand you buy for mundane uses. There are only 2-3 manufacturers who are still producing the drive mechanisms, the guts are all the same.

The second requires a third-party payware Blu-ray player application. This will set you back about $30-50. Why? The price covers the license to the Blu-ray consortium (or whatever they're called) for playback. It's this license fee that caused Steve Jobs to called Blu-ray a "bag of hurt" back in 2008 and killed off any chance of Blu-ray drives being included in Mac hardware. It would have added $15-20 of extra cost to every single Mac with a Blu-ray drive which Steve didn't want.

I have a ten-year-old Slimline Blu-ray drive (the guts are Pioneer) that I've used on a variety of Macs over that timeframe. It is not a good user experience.

The physical drives are cheaply produced and tend to rattle, wheeze, and shudder much more loudly than a standard set-top Blu-ray A/V player. The software user interfaces are particularly clunky and don't integrate well.

Today, I just rip Blu-ray media with MakeMKV and transcode using Handbrake so I can view the content on a variety of devices. I still have a cheap standalone Sony Blu-ray player for basic playback of silver optical media (audio CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, etc.). It's a lot quieter than the Pioneer Blu-ray computer drive.

So yes, you can watch Blu-rays on your MacBook Air with a Blu-ray drive and the requisite player software but it's not what I would call a pleasant experience.

 

[Fishrrman]

For hardware, you'll need an external USB BluRay drive.

But you'll need 3rd party software, too, to play commerically-pressed BD discs.

Try searching on "Free Mac BluRay Player". I've used it (the "unpaid/free" version), it will play the BD but put a -small- icon in the upper corner as the disc plays. Upgrading to the paid version eliminates this.

As Erehy mentioned above, you can also use "MakeMKV" to rip the BD to a computer file. I found that this is relatively easy and quick, HOWEVER, if you just want to watch it that way the file size is huge (20gb or so). OK if you just want to watch it and then trash the file.

To compress it down into a standard video format, you'll also need something like Handbrake, but this is processor-intensive and can take a while.

I've only experimented with one BD disc, and the Free Mac BluRay Player software worked just fine (in free mode) for me...