1. Blu Ray On Mac

Jan 23, 2019  With Blu-ray here for the long haul it’s important to understand a few things about what makes the best Blu-ray player software for your computer. Video & Audio: Quality Matters The best Blu-ray player software can read a variety of discs, not just Blu-ray. Look for one that can also play DVDs, CDs and rewritable discs. Part 1: Best NVIDIA Encoders for Mac – Leawo Blu-ray Ripper for Mac. The best NVIDIA encoder for Mac is Leawo Blu-ray Ripper for Mac, a professional and top-notch Blu-ray ripping software tool for Mac computers to freely decrypt, rip and convert Blu-ray movies to videos in various formats for various uses. There are two ways of ripping a Blu-ray Disc to a Mac. The first involves decrypting and copying the entire disc to an.iso disc image. This file will be the same size as the original Blu-ray. 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.

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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Blu-ray discs should have witnessed the second prime of DVD history if it was born much earlier for its best cinematic video enjoying experiences. Yet the way of playing Blu-ray is bound to hold back its growth in the modern age when people seek to ultra convenience and simplicity. If you are carrying a Mac, you aren't able to play Blu-ray without carrying an extra Blu-ray player, which can be very inconvenient sometimes.

To enjoy Blu-ray high-definition movies on the go or watch it on your Mac whenever you like, the best way is to rip Blu-ray and make some simple conversions. Here come five best Blu-ray rippers for Mac that we rate after taking every aspect of their features into consideration.

Blu Ray On Mac

VideoSolo Blu-ray Ripper - An All-in-one Solution to Blu-ray Conversion

VideoSolo Blu-ray Ripper earns a spot of the best Blu-ray ripping software on Mac due to its incredibly professional functionality in outputting high-quality or quality-lossless videos. It can automatically remove the encrypted Blu-ray of any type of proprietary protections and makes Blu-ray conversion a matter of minutes.

It is able to deal with all kinds of inputs --- Blu-ray/DVD disc, Blu-ray/DVD folder, DVD IFO files while resulting in various outputs that are playable on any Apple/Android devices, game console, TVs and editing software.

What's more, it allows you to go extra miles on editing features, such as trimming, picture polishing, crop & expand, 3D effects, external subtitles/audio tracks adding, etc. The cost of VideoSolo Blu-ray Ripper definitely pays off for all the useful and versatile functions in ripping Blu-ray on Mac and is highly competitive when compared with other paid professional rippers.

The good:

• Able to remove any encryption of commercial Blu-ray without resorting to the third party

• Rip Blu-ray on Mac at a high speed

• Convert into a raft of video formats which is compatible with any popular devices

• Extra video editing features to satisfy your customizing demands

• Support inserting extra subtitles and audio tracks or using the original ones

The bad:

• With the limitation of output length and no acceleration feature for the trial version

• Unable to convert Blu-ray into ISO image

MakeMKV - Easily Get MKV File From Blu-ray (free)

The way of MakeMKV working is to rip Blu-ray disc into a MKV file as it exists in the disc. It just works to place the Blu-ray file into a MKV container without changing the source content. So the resulting content will occupy the same amount of space as the Blu-ray disc does. However, you can opt to rip only a few chapters inside a disc on Mac as you desire. But it does not include many advanced editing features. So anyone who is not so well versed in Blu-ray ripping lingo can also quickly operate on its interface. The copy speed on Mac varies from disc to disc, but overall it is efficient compared with its ripping counterparts.

The good:

• Able to rip some of the chapters inside a Blu-ray or make a full backup without tweaking the source content

• Able to read Blu-ray/DVD with protected with the latest versions of AACS and BD+

• Convert as fast your drive can read data

• Free in ripping DVD and Blu-ray decryption and processing during BETA

The bad:

• it won't feature with many video or audio options for tweaking the quality of the resulting MKV file.

Handbrake - The Best Free Solution to Video Conversion

As a powerful open source video transcoding software, Handbrake tries to help both computer novice and experts to handle video converting needs, in this passage, Blu-ray ripping needs. It may not be the simplest ripping tool nor the most versatile solution. Yet, it remains an enticing cross-platform video transcoder providing all the basic features to rip unprotected DVD/Blu-ray into videos of H.264, MPEG-4 and other codes. Its existence poses threat to many paid alternatives by offering to convert high-quality video from Blu-ray for free. However, it may not be so novice-friendly with all the confusing advanced settings.

PhotoScape X is a relative newcomer when compared to photo-editing veterans like Photoshop Elements, but this free app has proved popular with many users on both Macs and Windows PCs. Editing photo software for mac free.

The good:

• Support batch conversions by setting a queuing tray

• With an advanced configuration that gives you fine-tuned control over video quality during conversion>

• Give you the ability to add audio tracks and subtitles to the resulting video

• Allow you to create new chapters

The bad:

• With the intimidating interface and too sophisticated advanced settings for newbies to tinker with

• Time- and energy-consuming in trial and error when exploring the Blu-ray conversion process

• Require the third party to remove the protection of DVD/Blu-ray

• Only support the live preview of the first four minutes of video

DVDFab Blu-ray Ripper for Mac - Fast Ripper and Protected Blu-ray Cracker

DVDFab Blu-ray Ripper is the only Mac ripping tool that some people really love it while others truly hate it. It boasts many extremely powerful features significant for a Blu-ray ripper. On the one hand, it takes the pride in its encryption capability, easily circumventing all known AACS copy protections, including the newest MKB v26 and bus encryption, Region Code, BD-Live, and UOPs.

On the other hand, it is fully qualified to brag about its conversion speed propelled by multi-core CUPs. It is a piece of cake for DVDFab Blu-ray Ripper for Mac to rip multiple files simultaneously of different as well as of one title with different profiles.

Plus, to your delight, its output quality is near-flawless. However, it also has some fatal downsides, such as limited input and output support as well as being too costly.

The good:

• Fast conversion speed and high-definition output

• Powerful decryption ability

• Able to only use the forced subpicture streams in Blu-ray conversion

• Enable to rip any title or clips to users' need by selecting starting and ending chapters.

The bad:

• User-unfriendly interface

• Poor input and output support: unable to rip DVD

• Do not support AMD APP encoding

• Cost more than its paid alternatives.

Leawo Blu-ray Ripper for Mac - A Moderate Ripping Software

Leawo Blu-ray Ripper comes with popular features to convert 2D/3D Blu-ray/DVD to so-called 180+ video formats playable on common digital devices. It is equally powerful in removing region code and copy protection for Mac users, such as AACS encryption, BD+, and the latest MKB technology, as well as CSS-encrypted DVD discs. However, it is unable to convert Blu-ray into MKV file without compromising quality. To add your disappointment, its conversion speed is not as high as it officially claims to be while many bonus features in customizing the output profile are limited.

The good:

• Get an upper hand in circumventing many types of copy protection and region codes

• Support batch conversions for Blu-ray at a time

• Abundant preset profiles

The bad:

• Slower conversion speed than its competitors

• Loss of video quality after Blu-ray conversion

• Limited bonus features to give you full control over the output file

To sum up, after taking into consideration the ease of use, conversion speed, output quality, bonus features as well as costs, then VideoSolo Blu-ray Ripper should be your priority choice. It provides a free trial version for you to attempt a short clip of conversion with all the other features other than acceleration. However, you might as well try the freeware to rip your Blu-ray on Mac if you are determined to invest time and efforts on ripping procedures.