- Best Blu-ray Playback Software For Mac Download
- Pc Blu Ray Playback
- Best Blu Ray Player Software For Macbook Pro
- Mac Blu Ray Player Software
Jan 10, 2020 But 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.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. Mac Blu-ray Player supports DTS 5.1 surround sound and Dobly Digital for awesome audio quality. Pro Tip: Most DVD playback software won’t let you capture images from your movies. With Mac Blu.
Since the late '90s, Macs have welcomed DVD movies. Pop a disc in your drive, watch Apple's DVD Player app open, and enjoy the show. Simple. But DVDs' high-definition successors, Blu-rays, never got the same warm reception. Today, the right third-party hardware and software will let you play Blu-ray discs on your Mac. But, uh … maybe you shouldn't?
Tell us how you really feel, Steve
Steve Jobs famously hated the licensing hurdles and hefty fees Blu-ray imposed. With his characteristic taciturn restraint, he publicly called the format a 'bag of hurt' and likened the groups behind it to the Mafia. Apple never built Blu-ray drives into Macs, and eventually ditched optical drives altogether to focus on selling movies through iTunes.
But 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. 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.
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. But there are a few options respectable enough to make it into the Mac App Store. We'll discuss those in a moment, but first, let's talk about another app that sounds like a good idea, but really isn't.
Blu-rays on VLC
VLC is a justly beloved open-source video player — free, robust, and able to play tons of different formats. With the right tinkering, Blu-ray can be one of them. But playing Blu-rays on VLC is like free-climbing a skyscraper without safety equipment: Sure, it's technically possible, but it's also incredibly difficult, full of drawbacks, and almost certainly a bad idea.
For starters, the site I originally used to find the right files that would supposedly enable Blu-ray playback on VLC is, as of this writing, no longer capable of establishing secure connections. (Which is why I'm not linking to it here.)
When it was up and running, its sparse instructions didn't seem to work, and I had to go digging for another site's advice to get VLC playing even sort of nice with Blu-ray. Then I had to separately install Java to have any hope of getting Blu-ray interactive menus working.
Even after all that, VLC wouldn't play most discs I tried with it, ominously warning me of revoked certificates and other things that sound like they involve well-paid lawyers. And when it did play discs, it refused to let me skip past the annoying preview video tracks before the movie; sometimes, trying to do so just dumped me back at the beginning of them.
VLC works great for lots of things. Blu-ray playback isn't one of them. Just don't do it. Especially when you've got another free and far more legitimate option waiting for you in the Mac App Store.
Leawo Blu-ray Player
The two currently available Mac Blu-ray apps come from Chinese companies. Shenzhen-based Leawo's is by far the cheaper – as in, it's free – and while it's perfectly adequate, you definitely get what you pay for.
I tested Leawo's player with a selection of discs from every major studio (plus Criterion, for you cinephiles out there), ranging from titles I bought back in 2009 to discs released in 2018. They all played just fine, with a crisp picture and clear sound. Leawo's menus let me easily switch audio and subtitle tracks, and jump between different video files on the disc with a Playlist option. And unlike hardware Blu-ray players, it's not region-locked, so you can watch discs from all over the world.
But bones don't get much barer than Leawo's offering. It doesn't support Blu-ray menus at all; if you want to view special features, you'll need to guess at their location from the Playlist menu. If you're dying to watch, say, The Sound of Music's pop-over interactive commentary with sing-along mode, Leawo's app will not be one of your favorite things.
The app takes a solid minute (I timed it) just to load a disc, a process that requires multiple un-intuitive menu clicks, and whoever ported it into Mac didn't bother to change the drab Windows-like interface.
If you just want to watch Blu-rays on your Mac, Leawo will definitely do that. It's perfectly serviceable. It doesn't seem to install spyware or bother you with ads. But there's a better (and considerably more expensive) choice if you want a more robust experience.
Macgo Blu-ray Player Pro
Hong Kong-based Macgo's Blu-ray Player Pro usually sells for a whopping $79.95, though you can watch for frequent sales that will knock the price down to a still-lofty $39.95. On the App Store, with a 'family' license to run on multiple Macs, it'll cost you $64.99. (There's a marginally cheaper non-Pro version, but like Leawo's app, it doesn't fully support menus, so why bother?)
For that price, you'll get an experience nearly identical to popping a disc into any regular Blu-ray player. Macgo's app played my test discs flawlessly, with full support for menus and a virtual remote that even mirrored the what-are-they-even-there-for red, blue, green, and yellow buttons on the average Blu-ray remote. Its interface isn't Mac-like, but it's clean, intuitive, and unobtrusively minimal.
Discs loaded quickly — 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. 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. 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. I couldn't tell or test whether Macgo's app was region-free, but I'd be surprised if it weren't.
The only shortfall I found in Macgo's app, besides its price, was its lack of support for 3D or 4K UHD Blu-rays. I'm sure that's a dealbreaker for some folks, but most users probably won't lament it.
Maybe just don't
In hindsight, Steve Jobs may have been right to keep Blu-ray drives out of Macs. On a laptop screen, you may not be able to fully enjoy the HD splendor of a great Blu-ray picture. (And hauling around an external drive plus discs would make the experience a lot less portable.) Desktop Macs with big screens already have Netflix, iTunes, and lots of other less noisy and expensive ways to watch HD movies.
For the same $120 - $180 you'd shell out for Macgo's app and a good external drive, you could buy a decent Blu-ray player to hook up to your big-screen TV. (Reputable names like Sony and LG offer region-free players you can score for $100 or less with a little comparison-shopping.)
If you don't own a TV or a Blu-ray player, do own a Mac, already own an external Blu-ray drive for some other purpose – like ripping the Blu-ray discs you own for your personal digital collection – and really, really want to watch Blu-rays specifically off the discs, you'll likely be pleased with Macgo's app, and reasonably satisfied with Leawo's.
But with so many other, less troublesome ways to watch movies on your Mac, maybe you're better off leaving this particular bag of hurt alone.
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What is VLC?
VLC is a popular cross-platform open-source media player. You can find VLC on different platforms like desktop operating system including macOS, Windows and linux and mobile operating systems including Android, iOS, and Windows 10 Mobile, etc.
Does Apple have Blu-ray playback software?
No, it doesn’t. Apple had never taken Blu-ray seriously. The company didn’t really care to release a computer with a Blu-ray drive, not even once. The company only had a DVD drive featured in some of its Mac computers and laptops which had been put to an end recently. Apple had stopped giving DVD drives to users in order to make its computers slimmer and lighter. The last MacBook that you can find with a DVD drive in it is the Mid 2012 MacBook Pro 15, which Apple had stopped selling in 2016. So it’s only logical that you won’t find Blu-ray player software on a Mac computer.
Can VLC play Blu-ray?
One of the reasons why it’s so popular is because it’s free. Since Apple’s never been fans of Blu-ray, which can be seem from its attitude towards Blu-ray, you shouldn’t expect Apple to give you an official player on Mac to play Blu-ray, which it doesn’t. So a third-party Blu-ray drive and Blu-ray player app is needed. Some Blu-ray player apps on Mac are not free, if you don’t want to pay for it, then VLC is the one you want to go with. But VLC doesn’t support playback of Blu-rays, not without some modification. There are things you can do to make VLC play Blu-ray discs on Mac, and it’s fairly easy to make that happen.
How to enable Mac VLC to play Blu-ray
To enable VLC to play Blu-ray on Mac, here are all the things you need.
Below are the detailed steps on how to enable VLC to play Blu-ray on Mac
Step 1. Go online, find the latest version of VLC, download it and install it on your computer. There are a lot of websites that offers VLC. But for the sake of safety, you can go to VLC’s official site: videolan.org to download it.
Step 2. Open the following link with your browser: https://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/. Find the KEYS DATABASE(KEYDB.cfg) and the AACS DYNAMIC LIBRARY(libaacs.dylib for mac) on it and download them to your Mac.
Step 3. Move the KEYDB.cfg file to ~/Library/Preferences/aacs folder and the libaacs.dylib file to the ~/lib directory folder. The ~ symbol refers to home directory. If you can’t find the ~/lib folder, create it by yourself, it’ll still work.
After the two files are put in the right location, you can connect your Blu-ray drive to your Mac and put your Blu-ray disc in it to play start playing Blu-ray on Mac. With the two files above, you also get to play a Blu-ray ISO file or a Blu-ray folder with VLC on Mac if you have them. With all the works above done, it’ll become VLC Blu-ray player Mac users could use for Blu-ray playback. Note that VLC currently doesn’t support Blu-ray menus, so it’ll require you to select which title to play manually.
How to use VLC Mac to play Blu-ray by ripping Blu-ray to Mac
Another way to use VLC to play the Blu-ray movie on Mac is to rip the Blu-ray to a VLC-compatible format on Mac. Considering that VLC is an open-source video player, you can convert the Blu-ray movie to videos in a lot of different formats to play on Mac.
To get the best out of the Blu-ray movie, you should get a high-quality Blu-ray ripper to make a high-quality digital copy of your Blu-ray disc on Mac. It would be ideal if the Blu-ray ripper can create a lossless copy of your Blu-ray movie to watch on your Mac computer. There are programs that can do something like that. One of them is Leawo Blu-ray to MKV Converter for Mac. It’s a top-notch Blu-ray ripper program that can convert the Blu-ray movie to a lossless MKV video which packs all the original data in the MKV container without compression. It’ll allow you to enjoy the movie with the highest quality without needing the Blu-ray disc and the Blu-ray drive every time you play the movie.
Leawo Blu-ray to MKV Converter Mac
☉ Rips Blu-ray of all sources to lossless MKV.
☉ Able to rip protected Blu-rays.
☉ Saves all audio tracks and subtitles you need.
Here’s how to make a lossless MKV video from your Blu-ray movie using Leawo Blu-ray to MKV Converter for Mac.
Step 1. Add source Blu-ray content to the program
Put the disc you want to rip to your Blu-ray drive and kick off Leawo Blu-ray to MKV Converter for Mac from the launch pad. And then on the interface, find the Add Blu-ray/DVD button in the top-left corner. Click on the Add Blu-ray/DVD button and then click Add from CD-ROM from the drop-down menu that follows. Click on the following option to load the content of the disc to the converter for further processing.
Best Blu-ray Playback Software For Mac Download
Step 2. Choose the titles you need
When the program finishes loading the content of the disc, it’ll show you all the video titles in the disc on the left side of the interface. To the right of the video list is the video player which you can use to play videos on the left. To play a video, just double-click a video title on the video list. Above the video list you will find 3 buttons: Full Movie, Main Movie and Custom Mode. Considering that you might not want to rip all the videos, the 3 options are for you to pick different video titles to rip. Full Movie button will select all the titles on the list for ripping. Main Movie will only select the main movie to rip. Custom Mode provides you with the option to pick multiple video titles you need by yourself from the video list. After choosing the video you need, click the OK button below the video player and it will take you to the interface where all videos you chose from this step will be listed in.
Step 3. Pick the audio tracks and subtitles you need
Pc Blu Ray Playback
You can see a Subtitles option and a Audio option on each video. Click on one of the options and a drop-down menu would appear with all the audio tracks and subtitles included in that video. You can pick the audio tracks and subtitles you like freely on the drop-down menu to save in the output MKV video.
If you want to play a video, just click the Play button which you can find on the thumbnail of the video on the left. During playback of a video, you are also allowed to choose different audio tracks and subtitles for it.
Step 4. Start converting the Blu-ray movie to lossless MKV
In the upper right-hand corner of the interface you can see a green Convert button. Click on this button and a sidebar would pop up from the right. The default output directory is shown on top of the sidebar. You can change it to a new directory if you want. When you are done setting up the output directory, click the Convert button on the sidebar to let the program start to convert the Blu-ray movie in your disc to MKV.
Below’s the video guide of Leawo Blu-ray to MKV Converter for Mac.
The lossless MKV video you get from Leawo Blu-ray to MKV converter can be played directly with VLC video player. If you like, you can also transfer the MKV video to your iPhone or iPad and use a third-party video player to play the MKV video on them. What’s great about converting the Blu-ray movie to MKV is that you don’t have to look for the Blu-ray disc and the Blu-ray drive every time you want to watch the movie. The only thing is that the lossless MKV would be large and take up a lot of your storage space. If you don’t mind that, then it’s a great way to watch Blu-ray on your Mac. If you like watching movies on your iPhone or iPad, check out Leawo Blu-ray Ripper for Mac, it can rip Blu-ray to MP4 on Mac with high quality.
The best Blu-ray player software alternative to VLC to play Blu-ray on Mac for free
There isn’t much Blu-ray player software available to users for free. Other than VLC, you can also try Leawo Blu-ray Player for Mac. Here’s why.
Best Blu Ray Player Software For Macbook Pro
It’s compact as well as powerful. It can play encrypted Blu-ray/DVD disc directly. And you can also use it to play some videos in formats that are not supported by QuickTime and iTunes like RMVB and WMV. And it’ll only take up 4% of your CPU’s processing power to play a Blu-ray disc, meaning you can do other things while watch the movie without the player slowing you down. Frankly, I think it’s a superior choice to VLC for Blu-ray player software as you don’t have to spend time and effect to make it work with Blu-ray. Just download the program, install it and start playing Blu-ray movies with it. It also has a Windows version that works on Windows 7/8/8.1/10. If you have a Windows computer running Windows 10, you might need this program as like macOS, Windows 10 also doesn’t have Blu-ray player software pre-installed. With it you can easily play Blu-ray on Windows 10.
Leawo Blu-ray Player
Mac Blu Ray Player Software
☉ Supports playback of all kinds of Blu-ray/DVD discs.
☉ Completely free.
☉ Supports a wide range of video formats.
☉ Low CPU processing power consumption.