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Blu-Ray with new 27" iMac

Ok, hi all. This is my first post here and is regarding something I'm very curious about. I've been nursing my old iBook G4 along for a while now and have figured that when I purchased a new computer at the end of the end or early next year, it would surely be another laptop. Then I saw the tech specs on the new iMac...

I'm wondering, is it possible to run blu-ray discs on an external player with this new computer? I know there have been issues with using blu-rays on OS X, where you'd have to play them off Windows or something, but am not sure if this would be an issue with the 27". It's such a beautiful screen that it would be disappointing to not be able to run HD discs on it.

I went up to the Apple Store today for some window shopping (that joke never gets old to me) and I completely fell in love with the computer. LOVED the new mouse and everything except the seemingly overly small keyboard. They were quite busy and the one guy I talked to wasn't sure about hooking up an external BD drive. It's probably the difference between me getting the 21.5" with baseline RAM settings or a 13" MacBook Pro and going all the way and getting a 27" with lots of extra RAM and Video RAM.

Was extremely impressed with what I saw and am leaning towards the 27", but would like to know in advance if I could run BD discs down the line on it. The display is really lovely.

Message was edited by: atnumbers

iBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Oct 22, 2009 6:37 PM

18 replies

qbunnie

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Apr 7, 2010 6:54 PM in response to Yer_Man

Tough to tell if Apple will include Bluray support. I'm sure they want to push their online service, but the video quality (blurays are MUCH higher bitrate encodings) and surround sound if bluray discs are still much better.

The nice thing is you CAN get it working in Windows via Bootcamp. It can be tricky, especially with Windows 7 64-bit and perhaps others. Here is the workaround for a 27" core i7 iMac running Window 7 pro 64-bit:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2264714&tstart=2&messageI D=11341693#11341693

TVPAV

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Apr 12, 2010 1:05 PM in response to qbunnie

I've done my first test of creating Blue-Ray disc on 27" iMac, external Lacie writer and Toast 10 with HD plug-in.

I used very short 1080p .mov clip created in Final Cut Express (350Mb - about 4 min long) - By just dragging the file to the Toast window caused it to hang for about 15 minutes. I guess that Toast was "thinking" about it - when it finally came on and I added menu to it, it worked fine until I started recording it to the disc. I took ages - close to 2 hours. Painfully slow - It's really strange. I can't even imagine how long it will take to burn 2 hour film on it.

Pav

Preston Arms Fair
TVPAV studio S

ajay71

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May 5, 2010 5:18 PM in response to TVPAV

I was able to burn a 2hr home video onto a 4X BD-R in about in roughly about 2hrs on my PC which has a dual boot with Snow Leopard/Roxio Toast Pro. The bluray disc came out pretty good with the menus and plays well on my standalone Samsung Blura Player/PS3 hooked to a Sony 1080P HD TV.

The burn process failed to start once after encoding the HD clip from my Canon Camcorder while burning at the full speed of 4x. So, I was forced to choose the lower write speed of 2X, which worked perfectly fine in burning subsequent discs as well.

Now, I need to try doing the same on my newly acquired Apple iMac 27" i5 2.66GHz Display unit.

Blu-Ray with new 27" iMac