Commercial Blu-Ray playback on PPC OS X, it IS possible!

[Matias_]

As many of you might know, MacOS Leopard introduced a built-in UDF 2.5 driver. This means it can read Blu-Rays and HD DVDs with a suitable drive. One problem always remained however, there was no software to play back commercial titles. There were several companies selling Blu-Ray drives marketed as being PowerMac compatible and BD authoring packages such as Roxio Toast yet the playback software for commercial encrypted discs always remained an Intel exclusive.

Looking around on this forum and various other places on the internet, the general consensus hence seems to be that this is impossible. Reasons cited are the lack of HDCP as well as blatant misinformation such as the alleged facts that even the fastest G5's lack the power to decode 1080p video and that IDE Blu-Ray drives never existed. So I am here to prove the opposite.

The saving grace is VLC, the open source media player we all know and love. The last version of VLC released for PowerPC is version 2.0.10 for Leopard from early 2014. This is quite a mature version of the software and happens to be one of the first versions with experimental Blu-Ray playback support! The one roadblock is that VLC does not ship with the required libaacs library for Blu-Ray decryption. But as it turns out, it is trivial to compile and install with TigerBrew. Low and behold, after obtaining the necessary keyfile it works flawlessly!

Video playback is perfectly smooth on my machine. Frames are only dropped when seeking back and forth or taking a screenshot.

For anyone that wants to try it out, you can basically follow this great guide targeting Apple Silicon and Intel, just make sure to use TigerBrew instead of HomeBrew and make sure to download the right VLC version: https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2024/02/19/how-to-play-blu-rays-on-mac-vlc.html

Note that it is quite CPU intensive so I suspect that at the very minimum, it requires one of the faster dual G5 models. CPU usage from VLC during playback on my G5 Quad was around 160% according to activity monitor. And one of the 5 titles I tested would not play smoothly, that being Jurassic Park. I'm not sure if it has stronger encryption, a higher bit rate or a different codec but my older x86 machines struggle to play it back as well. So keep in mind that not every title may work perfectly.

 

[Dt990]

Very, I wish I'd taken the time to look into this more, but I'll update my guide soon with this thread. I need to try this on my dual 1.4 GHz G4 to see if it can playback LOTR.

Thanks for this!

 

[Doq]

Who would win?

• Gigantic movie industry encryption DRM
• Traffic cone

Oh yeah, VLC 3.0.21 is available via PPCPorts pre-built for SL-PPC and from source for Leopard.

 

[Matias_]

Ah yeah, I was aware of this. But to install PPCPorts it seems like I have to wipe my existing MacPorts installation and start from scratch again. Perhaps I should try it, PPCPorts does seem better because it is actually maintained and curated but I've had nothing but trouble since I started using MacPorts in August 2024. More and more things break every day.

 

[PowerPC74]

I wonder how the Quad G4 will handle BR?

I'll have to check if VLC can use more than 2 cores to decode.

BR can be a few codecs, HD MPEG2 can be accelerated by the GPU on OS X PPC, so that could help on Discs encoded with MPEG2.

Some of the GPUs for PPC can do other HD Codecs but there was never driver/OS support.

 

[PowerPC74]

The GeForce 7600/7800/7900 did support nVidia's Pure Video HD 1( Realtime decode of H.264 high-profile L4.1, VC-1 advanced profile L3, and MPEG-2 MP@HL (1080p30 up to 40 Mb/s).

The 7800 was an "Official" card for PPC Mac's we've made it work in even Old World Beige G3's and @LightBulbFun made a Quadro 4500 work in a PowerMac 9600. I did confirm the drivers were there for the Geforce 7600 GT in PPC and I just assume the 7900's would work too, as far as OS and drivers support, but it's the FCODE ROM's that proved though.

Anyway, Apple had a private API for HD MPEG2 playback on the GPU for the Geforce 5200+ and I've used it in an app called iTeli that came from MMINPUT drivers for DVB/ATSC HD PCI cards.

On my old PM G5 1.8GHz 600MHz bus with the GF5200 it played back full bitrate MPEG2 HD Transport steams without dropping frames and minimal CPU usage. Sadly I don't think Apple ever implemented h.264/h.265 hardware acceleration until the Geforce 8 and they had forked the nVidia drivers for Intel only.

Nouveau open source drivers had not got "Pure Video HD 1" working on the older class cards( 7600/7800/7900 ) last time I checked, so there isn't much we can learn yet from that.

We could likely pull the code from iTeli that taps into Apple's private API for HD MPEG2 playback and add it to VLC if anyone is interested in that?

It world just offload HD MPEG2 to the GPU and free up CPU cycles.

 

[Matias_]

That's would be very interesting. I have a 7800 GT in my G5 Quad at the moment so I would be able to test if the need arises.

 

[PowerPC74]

That's would be very interesting. I have a 7800 GT in my G5 Quad at the moment so I would be able to test if the need arises.

If you have clean instructions for building VLC for PPC with BluRay support I'll see if I can port a plugin for the HD MPEG2 HW playback for everyone to test?

 

[Andrew-R]

There is h264 vda checker on github

GitHub - breuhan/VDADecoderCheck: Check the support of your graphics card to support Apple's Video Decode Acceleration framework and play h264 content with hardware acceleration.

Check the support of your graphics card to support Apple's Video Decode Acceleration framework and play h264 content with hardware acceleration. - breuhan/VDADecoderCheck

github.com

and ffmpeg changelog says VDA acceleration appeared in version 0.9 and was killed in 4.0 (if I read it correctly)

 

[Andrew-R]

more on (official) VDA:

GPU video acceleration made possible by Apple?

this thread says it was in 10.6.3 but some components exist in 10.5 Not sure if info about 10.4 correct or not ....

list few (5) bluray titles encoded with mpeg2 at the time thread was active (2010)

No signs of mpeg2 acceleration, but yes I recall reading about private framework on osx to decode mpeg2.

For h264 decoding via opengl there was *unfinished* project on github:

GitHub - slash-dev-null/gsoc: An attempt to complete Robert Rudd's GSOC project of 2008 with XBMC

An attempt to complete Robert Rudd's GSOC project of 2008 with XBMC - slash-dev-null/gsoc

github.com

 

[TheShortTimer]

I wonder how the Quad G4 will handle BR?

Quad G5, right?

I'll have to check if VLC can use more than 2 cores to decode.

BR can be a few codecs, HD MPEG2 can be accelerated by the GPU on OS X PPC, so that could help on Discs encoded with MPEG2.

Some of the GPUs for PPC can do other HD Codecs but there was never driver/OS support.

My feeble 2010 MBA 1.4Ghz C2D with a Nvidia 320M GPU can play a number of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC encoded BR discs either flawlessly or acceptably so I'd expect a Quad G5 to be able to manage this on the hardware side.

 

[Andrew-R]

Here is little overview of VP1 processor inside some nv4x GPUs, but I am afraid writing anything to utilize it will be VERY non-trivial (even for VP2-5 Nouveau used binary firmwares, and even then only original mplayer worked acceptably via vdpau)

https://envytools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hw/vdec/vpe/pvp1/intro.html

 

[barracuda156]

Looking around on this forum and various other places on the internet, the general consensus hence seems to be that this is impossible. Reasons cited are the lack of HDCP as well as blatant misinformation such as the alleged facts that even the fastest G5's lack the power to decode 1080p video and that IDE Blu-Ray drives never existed. So I am here to prove the opposite.

Dunno where those people get info from. The Quad can play 4K. Not that it plays every 4K vid smoothly, but it is usable. 1080p is trivial, and will work fine on dual G5s and probably on G4 too.

The saving grace is VLC, the open source media player we all know and love. The last version of VLC released for PowerPC is version 2.0.10 for Leopard from early 2014. This is quite a mature version of the software and happens to be one of the first versions with experimental Blu-Ray playback support! The one roadblock is that VLC does not ship with the required libaacs library for Blu-Ray decryption. But as it turns out, it is trivial to compile and install with TigerBrew. Low and behold, after obtaining the necessary keyfile it works flawlessly!

Judging from dependencies, a lot of players should read BlueRay. I cannot try, since I have no BlueRay disks, but it shouldn’t really be an issue.

For anyone that wants to try it out, you can basically follow this great guide targeting Apple Silicon and Intel, just make sure to use TigerBrew instead of HomeBrew and make sure to download the right VLC version: https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2024/02/19/how-to-play-blu-rays-on-mac-vlc.html

You may have a better experience with newer players in fact.

 

[barracuda156]

Oh yeah, VLC 3.0.21 is available via PPCPorts pre-built for SL-PPC and from source for Leopard.

As a disclaimer, this is a very experimental port which did work at the point when I wrote it, however at the moment it is mostly broken for me (in fact it does not play many vids even on a modern x86).
And in all honesty, I would rather discourage from trying it, since the expected outcome is a lot of frustration, especially if someone wastes hours to build it from source (it pulls in a lot of dependencies).
I kinda regret I wasted a lot of my time on VLC, and IMO it just badly written – and poorly maintained.

There are much better players that work neatly and have a newer code.

QMPlay2 is a gem. And while I hate mpv support policy (= a lack of support), but hey, unlike vlc at least it works.
mplayer may be good for resource-constrained environments.

 

[barracuda156]

We could likely pull the code from iTeli that taps into Apple's private API for HD MPEG2 playback and add it to VLC if anyone is interested in that?

I am interested, though QMPlay2 will be a few better choice, not only because its code is better, but also because its upstream actually cares about users.

Please ping me here or via GitHub on the matter.

 

[Matias_]

Dunno where those people get info from. The Quad can play 4K. Not that it plays every 4K vid smoothly, but it is usable. 1080p is trivial, and will work fine on dual G5s and probably on G4 too.

Yeah I don't understand either. In fact I am would not be surprised if Apple edited FHD footage on their G5s back in the day. My MDD plays 1080p fine with CorePlayer. But the G5 has enough raw compute to do it with less efficient video players as well.

Judging from dependencies, a lot of players should read BlueRay. I cannot try, since I have no BlueRay disks, but it shouldn’t really be an issue.

You may have a better experience with newer players in fact.

I don't dispute these claims, there are indeed a lot of video players that can utilize libaacs. But the old VLC 2.0.10 release will be the easiest way to do this for most people. I could not find anyone that had done this before, that's why I made this thread.

QMPlay2 and MPV work great on Linux, I guess I should try compiling them on MacOS as well.

 

[Dt990]

As someone who had a Dually G5 2 GHz with around 4 GB of RAM and Nvidia 6800 or whatever it was. I could playback 720p H264 pretty easily. MKV 720p videos mostly, as I'd "borrow" 720p rips of TV shows but occasionally the videos would smear. 1080p would playback (mostly) in Quicktime like watching movie trailers but was completely unwatchable in VLC.

I could edit 720p and 1080i but with a lot of rendering and making 720p motion graphics in Apple Motion but again, 1080p was a bit too much for it.

This and it's performance in audio apps is why the G5 was the most disappointing Mac I owned.

 

[barracuda156]

As someone who had a Dually G5 2 GHz with around 4 GB of RAM and Nvidia 6800 or whatever it was. I could playback 720p H264 pretty easily. MKV 720p videos mostly, as I'd "borrow" 720p rips of TV shows but occasionally the videos would smear. 1080p would playback (mostly) in Quicktime like watching movie trailers but was completely unwatchable in VLC.

Most likely a problem with VLC, not a Mac. Not a fault of a G5 that VLC code is garbage

This and it's performance in audio apps is why the G5 was the most disappointing Mac I owned.

What was the problem with audio apps? Kinda surprised to hear this. (To be clear, I do not do audio production myself, but Macs were famous for that, AFAIK, including back in PPC era.)

 

[Dt990]

Most likely a problem with VLC, not a Mac. Not a fault of a G5 that VLC code is garbage



What was the problem with audio apps? Kinda surprised to hear this. (To be clear, I do not do audio production myself, but Macs were famous for that, AFAIK, including back in PPC era.)

The g5 was woefully under powered so you’d constantly need to use freeze track, which is basically rendering down either virtual instruments or tracks with FX to an uneditable state. At the time, it wasn’t uncommon for hardcore digital musicians to have GigaStudio running on a pc with midi and a low latency card like RME and outputting to a mixer along with the Mac running the DAW, so it could trigger samples. Apple’s pro audio was better because of core audio for latency generally but the lack of processing power meant a lot of work around. Since I wasn’t a pro, I’d lay down, say a baseline and freeze and then move to a lead and freeze that and then unfreeze the bass. Usually you could get away a few tracks unfrozen.

That all changed when they went Intel. I never used freeze tracks on my 2008 Mac Pro.

Going from a 2004 g5 to Mac Pro 2008 was a bigger jump than going from a Mac Pro 2010 to M1 Max. I always tell this same story, first thing I did with it was open a 1080p movie in vlc. The another and another, I was able to play back 8 videos at 1080p. My g5 couldn’t even do one. I knew things weren’t great when a friend had a cheaper AMD 64 x2 system and could playback 1080p in whatever app he wanted. Also that same time the pentium m dropped and made Apple laptops look kinda sad performance wise. The late gen PowerPC era was kinda painful.

Also, I was able to edit 1080p without needing to do downconverts for proxies. And hell, I even have edited 4k on the 2008.

The g5 was just a modest upgrade from my g4 and thus really disappointing as it was an inflection point. People were moving to pure DAW flows instead of racks of hardware, and using 24 bit. The world was going HD. Anyhow getting off topic…

 

[barracuda156]

Going from a 2004 g5 to Mac Pro 2008 was a bigger jump than going from a Mac Pro 2010 to M1 Max. I always tell this same story, first thing I did with it was open a 1080p movie in vlc. The another and another, I was able to play back 8 videos at 1080p. My g5 couldn’t even do one.

Well, I can assure you that G5 plays 1080p easily. I did not try multiple, can do that out of curiosity. But see below: you comparison is apples to oranges.

I knew things weren’t great when a friend had a cheaper AMD 64 x2 system and could playback 1080p in whatever app he wanted. Also that same time the pentium m dropped and made Apple laptops look kinda sad performance wise. The late gen PowerPC era was kinda painful.

That has nothing to do with PowerPC, to be honest. The issue boils down to:

1. Upstream developers don’t bother to optimize the code for anything besides x86 and maybe arm. Easy to verify: take any multimedia library and see how much Altivec code is there. Usually none
2. GPU vendors stopped writing drivers for PowerPC, so obviously your MacPro 2008 had a better GPU. This is totally unrelated to G5 vs Xeon thing.

 

[davisdelo]

The g5 was woefully under powered so you’d constantly need to use freeze track

That sucks that you got that performance out of your G5. I could only do 2 unlocked/6 locked tracks on a 600Mhz G3 iBook in Garageband. I don't even know how many my G5 2.3 DC can do unlocked, never reached the limit in Garageband or Logic; it's definitely over 10 unlocked from my experience (that's the most i ever needed). Maybe you had a bottleneck that went unnoticed? Any dual/1Ghz+ G4 and definitely any G5 should handle pretty much any audio production you can throw at it. I've always used an AJA interface though on the G5, maybe that makes a difference?

 

[barracuda156]

Meanwhile, 4K playback directly in terminal (is it useful? not so much, rather watch in qmplay2)

1080p plays with 0 frames dropped and no visible impact on performance: works fine with compiling something at the same time (and I compile with -j).