Lots of people want to watch Blu-ray movies on their Macs. Until now, though, doing so required ripping the movies to your hard drive and playing them that way. Mac Blu-ray Player from Macgo is a movie player that plays back Blu-ray movies from the original source discs.
How does it work?
First you need a Blu-ray drive. Fortunately, OWC just happens to sell some. 😉
Download & install the Mac Blu-ray Player application from Macgo.
After inserting a Blu-ray disc and launching the Mac Blu-ray Player application, you will be prompted to select your disc or a backed up .iso image. You must be connected to the Internet for the application to decrypt the disc for watching. After the application scans the disc, it begins playback.
Some of the early trials with Mac Blu-ray Player didn’t go well for me, as I had incredibly choppy video—even on a Mac Pro with plenty of horsepower and graphics power. With the latest update, though, playback is smooth and the picture looks great and works as advertised on everything I’ve tried it on, including the Mac mini and MacBook Air.
Macgo uses some open source components, but it is not clear exactly how they decrypt and provide playback of commercial discs. It’s also not clear regarding the legality of how they do what they do, but we do know it isn’t violating/hacking Apple and, to this point in time, we have not seen any legal challenge/concern publicly addressing this software in general nor in recent reviews by CNET and Macworld.
For those who did see this covered by Macworld, we want to re-iterate that in our testing with the current version—versus the older version Macworld had used—we found the product to work as advertised without any issues playing back on several different Macs including iMacs, Mac mini, MacBooks, and Mac Pro via our external Blu-ray drives.
So now we can watch Blu-ray movies on a Mac… Why?
If you’re using a Mac mini as a media center, this is a great application to have along with the OWC Slim Portable 6X Blu-ray Reader. However, if you already have a standalone Blu-ray player along with your Mac mini, you may just want to keep using it to take advantage of special features some Blu-ray players have that allow them to sync up to certain audio/video standards such as frame rate matching and advanced sound output like DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD…all of which results in a better experience for the viewer.
It’s also great for college students who may not have lugged a TV to school with them and do everything with their computer. Now they can watch Blu-ray movies on their Mac using an OWC Blu-ray Solution as well as watch TV using an Elgato TV tuner.
It’s also a nice alternative if you travel a lot and want to watch a movie in your hotel room. You can use it to watch your Blu-ray movies on your MacBook, provided that you’ve sprung for in-room Internet access or can otherwise go online for verification.
Give it a try.
Macgo gives you a free three month trial to try the application before you purchase it for $59.95.
