how do i play a blu ray disc on my mac

Does you Mac have a Blu-ray drive?

Use an external Blu-Ray drive (about $80-100 for the cheap ones online), and a program like this http://www.macblurayplayer.com/

Cheers!

Does you Mac have a Blu-ray drive?

@roaminggnome - As I understand it, no Mac ships with a Blu-ray drive.

@jhank - you need an external drive and third party software.

jhank wrote:

My first Mac, pretty underwhelmed so far. No ability to play a blu ray disc? Is it 1975 or 2012?

Apple's stated policy is to effectively phase out optical drives completely. All software, software updates and media, e.g. music, films and books, will be delivered online. So yeah, it's 2012, not 2006!!!!

Is that the best software to use to play Blu-Ray discs? I would love to get my college student daughter a Blu-Ray drive, so that she can play those discs on her Mac Mini, rather than have to deal with a whole big regular Blu-Ray player, changing her connections, etc.

Its all well and good for Apple to decide to be in the future now, but here I sit with the Harry Potter Blue Ray discs in 2012, and my mac (17", 8Gigs of Ram, Mac Book Pro) wondering why such an expensive machine can't do such a simple function. Nothing prevents Apple from shipping blue ray drives with their mac while they're busy phasing out optical drives.

One of the reasons I buy mac is so that I don't have to worry about this kind of crap. They are the "it just works" company. Blue-ray DVD players come standard on most intel based laptops. Apple likely has a snitch about royalties or some such.

Regardless, they are losing points in my book on this one.

Sorry, but that is a lame reply Zyriab - I know that Apple's plans are for all online downloads of everything, but since not everyone has great online speed at this point in time (millions in the US alone), this goal will be impossible for at least several years to come. Thus, while I have always considered them ahead of the curve on a lot of things, they missed the curve here with Blu Ray - it should be standard that all Macs after 2008-2009 play Blu Ray when they won the "war" on media.

It is not a good thing when Apple trys to dictate to everyone else just how ALL media should be, instead of looking around and seeing how real people live in the real world - and meeting the needs of their customers here and now - while still pushing ahead.

I love Apple, but here and there they miss the mark - and here with Blu Ray HD, they really missed the target all together.

We live in an area where we have really fast cable modem service from Cox cable (at an outrageous price if you odn't bundle the phone and TV service with it) but at least it's fast. That is until you decide to stream a DVD in Blueray/high def or whatever. Then the 12 meg/second minimum speed seems like 128k dial-up from way back before most of you were born. I also know Apple is moving to an all digital download world. But UNTIL and UNLESS the internet's infastructure catches up - maybe not installing blue-ray compatible dirives in the newer macs is not such a great idea after all. Sadly, now the options are replace the superdrive in my iMac 27' and void the warranty in the process of course, then buy and install a blueray player software, then get them to talk to each other well enough to actually work. By the time I got round to buying the extra software, being a Mac Junkie since way back - I was already disappointed. That's NOT the Apple way. The good thing about Mac's is the fact that they just WORK! Out of the box, for someone with no training on Unix - the darned things WORK and WORK WELL EVERY TIME! To be forced to buy additonal hardware, more software, and then hope they all will work together without interfering or messing something else up - sounds more and more like Windows than the Mac OS we all know and love. Hey Apple: how about developing a Blue-Ray player which should be a simple upgrade to your existing player module. I'll pop for the extra hardware if I must, but could you at least give us a list of what's been tested by Apple and vetted and is known to work like it's supposed to? Yes, we'll all be downloading our minds back-up in anohter ten years. And it will flow at 100/gig/sec minimum speed. And the 100/gig/sec connections will be so plentiful and so common that they'll cost as little as $20/month. But until then, admit that you're not going to see all digital media in the US for a few more years. And you might as well put the drives in the computers that actually work and play current formats like Blue Ray and regular DVD's and DVD's with data on them vs a movie.

shiney_penguins wrote:

Use an external Blu-Ray drive (about $80-100 for the cheap ones online), and a program like this http://www.macblurayplayer.com/

Cheers!

Is this the ONLY Blu-Ray software that exists?

Uh, Blu-ray players are a type of optical drive.

Apple, across the board, is eliminating all optical drives in all of their new laptop and desktop products.

Obviously, going for the iPad form factor in all of their products, now.

External drives have always been a staple device on the Mac platform.

With the use of Time Machine, external drives are even more critical.

There are lots of external optical and hard drives that work with Mac.

It not as simple for Apple to add Blu-ray capability to their optical drives.

The drives that come with Macs, currently are CD/DVD writable SuperDrives..

Apple would have had to, somehow, implement a writable drive that included reading and writing of Blu-ray Discs, too!

Tthis would have been more expensive to implement and would probably would've come as an optional drive to replace the standard equipt SuperDrive.

You would've paid extra for Blu-ray capability, anyways.

But it never happened.

So you pay for extra external drive instead!

When there are perfectly good Mac solutions out there, I really do not see the reason for all of this griping and whining!

You want a Blu-ray player and software for the Mac, it's out there! Buy it!

MichelPM wrote:

You want a Blu-ray player and software for the Mac, it's out there! Buy it!

Yes, but I only know http://www.macblurayplayer.com/ - is there other software?

BTW I already have an ext. SONY blu-ray drive which does everything the internal superdrive did before.

I'm afraid Apple's DVD player will never support ext. blu-ray drives...

I'm afraid Apple's DVD player will never support ext. blu-ray drives...

Apple does not own the license for BluRay - Sony does. And, Sony and Apple are not on the best of terms. So, without the rights to the license, Apple can't support it.