The best way to play blu ray discs/movies UP TO DATE

[neuroshock]

I am a huge TLOTR fan (lol) and up until recently I thought the quality of the movie i have(in digital form) was decent or even great, I recently bought a 15" inch macbook pro(2.2ghz)-- my first apple computer--- and when I played the same exact movie, the quality just looked terrible, in fact every digital movie I own doesn't look as stunning or high quality I thought it was. I'm slowly upgrading my movie library to a better quality one and the first thing I have to have is "the lord of the rings" trilogy(extended version)

, so I guess the closest i can get to high picture quality is by buying those blu ray discs, one problem: how do I play blu ray on my macbook pro and will I experience a better quality than those normal DVDs.

According to your experience with blu ray, which is the best way to play blu ray discs on a macbook? ( please provide steps or pointers since I'm new at this)

Also, any alternative suggestions to be able to watch the movie in high quality is welcome, i just thought blu ray was the closest thing to perfect quality. Keep in mind i can't buy from itunes since I don't own a credit card.

TL;DR : I need to play blu ray disc movies on my 15"macbook pro 2011, what's the best way to go about this to get as close to full quality as possible. Also, would it make any difference if I bought blu ray disks versus the conventional DVDs (regarding movie quality)? Since the screen resolution of the 15" pro is not enough to experience "full HD quality"?

A side note, I had posted this exact same thread on "apple discussions" and i go a reply basically saying: we can't talk about it cause its illegal.
Link to post: http://discussions.apple.co/thread.jspa?threadID=2813993&tstart=0
Guess, I should have seen that coming

 

[superericla]

You could get an external blu-ray drive and use a program such as MakeMKV to rip the movie onto your computer and watch it. There's no way I know of that allows you to play blu-ray movies straight from the disk at the moment in OS X. There should be a noticeable quality difference between DVD and blu-ray video, even on the MacBook.

 

[Cave Man]

According to your experience with blu ray, which is the best way to play blu ray discs on a macbook? ( please provide steps or pointers since I'm new at this)

It's a bit of a pain, but you can use MakeMKV's streaming server to pass the m2ts files from a Blu-ray disc (external USB2 or Firewire drive) to VLC for playback. The link to instructions is in my sig. You lose subtitles and only get Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1 surround sound by optical cable. You also lose menus (which is a good thing, IMO).

 

[AdrianK]

Also, would it make any difference if I bought blu ray disks versus the conventional DVDs (regarding movie quality)? Since the screen resolution of the 15" pro is not enough to experience "full HD quality"?

Assuming your MBP is non-high res, the resolution is 1440*900. Bluray is 1920*1080 compared to 720*480 for DVDs.

So if you consider that dvd content has to be stretched (roughly) to 2x it's original size in both the horizontal and vertical plane, each 'real' pixel is consuming four pixels. Since no stretching will occur with a bluray, you'll be getting 4x the definition.

I notice a massive difference between watching blurays and DVDs on my 13", even though the resolution is 1280*800.