On a laptop screen, you may not be able to fully enjoy the HD splendor of a great Blu-ray picture. In hindsight, Steve Jobs may have been right to keep Blu-ray drives out of Macs. The audio occasionally stuttered on the menu screens as the disc loaded new information, but the movies themselves played back smoothly.Īside from potentially needing to re-download MakeMKV every few months, or re-authorize VLC every time it downloads a new version, this approach seems like the best and least aggravating solution to play Blu-rays on your Mac.
Click "Open." In my tests, discs loaded in just a few seconds, and VLC offered full menu, audio, and subtitle support. The window that appears should show the Blu-ray you've loaded. Make sure your Blu-ray of choice is loaded in your disc drive. (Image credit: Nathan Alderman for iMore) In the Integration pane of MakeMKV's Preferences window, select "VLC" from the list of applications to empower it to play Blu-rays using MakeMKV's tools.
Unless or until you download a fresh copy or updated version of VLC in the future, you should only need to do this once to play Blu-rays to your heart's content. MakeMKV can share the tools it uses to decrypt Blu-ray discs (opens in new tab) with other apps, most notably VLC. In the list of eligible apps under the Integration tab in MakeMKVs Preferences, check the box next to VLC, and then click OK.
Macgo's app even supports BD-Live online features, though you'll have to go into the Preferences to turn that feature on it's switched off by default. The app offers hardware acceleration for smoother playback, though aside from loading speed, I didn't notice a difference in quality between it and Leawo's app. No one knows what those colored buttons are for, but Macgo's virtual remote has them anyway.ĭiscs loaded far faster than Leawo's player - 15 seconds, tops – and played the same pre-roll ads and trailers they would in a hardware player, though thankfully, I could skip them just as easily as I would elsewhere. But there are a few options respectable enough to make it into the Mac App Store - and an even better one that's (mostly) free.
Unfortunately, searching for mac Blu-ray player online gets you a lot of highly suspect sites with creatively translated English, each pitching their own totally not-at-all-questionable video player that may or may not actually play Blu-ray discs. And once those drives became available, a few enterprising companies who did (presumably) pay up for the keys to decrypt Blu-ray discs released Mac apps to play regular Blu-ray movies with those drives. Apple never built Blu-ray drives into Macs, and eventually ditched optical drives altogether to focus on selling movies through iTunes.īut some Mac users still need to burn their own Blu-rays or read data off BD discs, so there are plenty of third-party Blu-ray drives available for the Mac. With his characteristic taciturn restraint, he publicly called the format a " bag of hurt" and likened the groups behind it to the Mafia. Steve Jobs famously hated the licensing hurdles and hefty fees Blu-ray imposed.