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Ready to go Blu-Ray. Anything I should be aware of?

Apparently, youw ant a bl-ray player to watch movies...herers what I belive is the best answer:

Get a retail Blu-ray player. (might be even a PS3)

honestly, you only need a blu-ray drive in your computer if you want to burn blu-ray, but with USB 3.0, optical drives are really fading away from the regular user.

If you absotlutly want a blue-ray burner in your computer, get any exernal one or internal one, and bootcamp to windows.
 
LeandrodaFL said:
Apparently, youw ant a bl-ray player to watch movies...herers what I belive is the best answer:

Get a retail Blu-ray player. (might be even a PS3)

honestly, you only need a blu-ray drive in your computer if you want to burn blu-ray, but with USB 3.0, optical drives are really fading away from the regular user.

If you absotlutly want a blue-ray burner in your computer, get any exernal one or internal one, and bootcamp to windows.
Click to expand...

Can I connect my Apple Cinema Display to a retail Blu-ray player?

Also.. I've gotten the MKV/VLC thing to work with a DVD, but the framerate seems off in VLC. It looks like it's playing the 23.98 fps of the film at 29.97. Does that happen with Blu-Ray too?

Also, a 2 hour and 21 minute film is only showing up at an hour and a half in VLC, though it seems to play continuously through it if I just let it play rather than jumping around. Does the buffer process take a long time or something?
 
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Well, I just purchased Mac Blu-Ray Player for $39.95 (currently on sale). This doesn't mean I'm closing the doors to the other options.. I just wanted to grab this while the sale lasted in case it turns out to be my favorite choice.

In the registration information in the app, it says "Registered. Never expires." Does that mean it actually never expires? Somebody mentioned something about having to pay again each year... but this seems to have been a full purchase.

I think I'm going to be buying this drive as my first try:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/LG/WH14NS40MP/

It seems to be the latest version of the LGs that people have been praising in this thread.

Then I'll run down the street to this used book store that also has DVDs and Blu-Rays, and pick up some discs to check how everything works, before upgrading my whole collection.

I won't actually be getting the drive until the beginning of September though, as I am going on vacation until then. So that gives you guys plenty of time to provide any further advice or feedback. :)

Edit: Oh yeah.. what about the video card? I've been looking at upgrading to the 5770 from my x1900xt... will that be required for smooth Blu-Ray playback?
 
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StephenCampbell said:
What do you mean decoding is blocky? What does that look like? If this doesn't work then I can't invest all this money in it...
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I mean that at least on the David Gillmour live at Royal Albert Hall BRD, there were lots of interlacing artifacts, rapid scene changes or movement results in blockiness, and there is evidence of color banding, none of which appears on my set top (or PS 3) players and TVs. My Mac is a new 2012 MacPro Hex 3.33 with 32GB of memory; Apple Cinima 30" display; graphcis card is ATI Radeon 5870. Viewed at 1080x1920 in a window.

So, imho, MacGo BluRay Player is not the equivalent of a set top player at all. But also note that even DVDs with Apple internal DVD "SuperDrive" and Apple's DVD Player is no where near as good as my regular TV systems.
 
StephenCampbell said:
Also.. I've gotten the MKV/VLC thing to work with a DVD, but the framerate seems off in VLC. It looks like it's playing the 23.98 fps of the film at 29.97. Does that happen with Blu-Ray too?

Also, a 2 hour and 21 minute film is only showing up at an hour and a half in VLC, though it seems to play continuously through it if I just let it play rather than jumping around. Does the buffer process take a long time or something?
Click to expand...

I haven't noticed any framerate issues on BD except when playing back content that was originally in SD PAL, such as the special features on a UK BD. VLC has a manual setting for frame rate, but I've never used it and so I don't truly understand what it does.

I think the duration time being off is probably just a bug due to the nature of the playback solution being used. I've never had a movie not play all the way through.

Someone was working on a MakeMKV plugin for VLC, but it never went anywhere. I see now there is some sort of BD plugin for VLC to play BDs directly without MakeMKV. I haven't tried that yet.
 
Does anyone have any experience with either of these players?

http://www.bluray-player-software.com

http://www.dvdfab.com/mac-blu-ray-player.htm

Edit: Also, if the best option for the time being ends up being ripping the films to my computer, I could accept that for now as well. I really just want to upgrade my film collection to 1080p, and maintain a physical-media version of them the way I do now.

What is the best/standard method of ripping to the computer into a reasonably sized file that looks more or less the same as the original? (i.e. iTunes-ish quality)
 
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LeandrodaFL said:
Apparently, youw ant a bl-ray player to watch movies...herers what I belive is the best answer:

Get a retail Blu-ray player. (might be even a PS3)

honestly, you only need a blu-ray drive in your computer if you want to burn blu-ray, but with USB 3.0, optical drives are really fading away from the regular user.
Click to expand...
not really true at all.

I got an external bluray player that was only $60 and my reasoning was that I wanted to backup my bluray collection to iTunes. It's perfect and works for me with apple tv. I no never have to wait for all those b.s. bluray menus to load, and I can watch any movie from my collection on my iPad etc.

I bought this external USB bluray player for $60, I backup my BDs with MakeMKV, and then convert them with handbrake. It takes a while per movie, but once done its sooooo nice. I can watch them in the computer with VLC or in the living room in 1080p with appleTV.
 
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Just to update my experience :)
The only way to stop my Optical Blu-ray (both internal & external) from "disappearing" is to "untick " "put hard disks to sleep whenever possible".
I have tried as a 2nd device in the optical bay plus as an external in an OWC enclosure.
The result is the same, so I am just resigned to this fact.
Yes the player above works fine for me.
 
Well, I just got my LG 14X Internal Blu-Ray drive from OWC.

You know how there are those four screws that you have to remove from the memory bay area in order to slide the whole thing over to make room to remove the CPU heatsink cover and fans in order to access the SATA ports on the motherboard?

Well, those two small ones that face downwards by the edge of the machine wouldn't come out. They just wouldn't. It was as if Godzilla had tightened them.

So I plugged the SATA cable into the motherboard without having access to the motherboard (at least not what you could reasonably call access), and routed it through the machine adequately and into the optical drive bay, fans and heatsinks all still in place.

For those of you who have done this operation, you'll know how absurd what I did was.

In any case, it's in now, and it works, and Blu-Ray plays beautifully with the Mac Blu-Ray Player!

And I have an HD 5770 sitting on my bed which I haven't even put in yet.. it played beautifully with the X1900XT.
 
Is it worth getting a USB 3.0 external Blu ray vs USB 2.0?
Click to expand...

For movies, no. They don't come close to saturating even USB 2.0 bandwidth. Most commercial movies are in the neighborhood of 25-40Mbps data rate (roughly 3-5MBps); USB 2.0 is plenty fast for that.

For burning, maybe, provided you're burning discs at high speeds, like 8x or above.


Well, I just got my LG 14X Internal Blu-Ray drive from OWC.

You know how there are those four screws that you have to remove from the memory bay area in order to slide the whole thing over to make room to remove the CPU heatsink cover and fans in order to access the SATA ports on the motherboard?

Well, those two small ones that face downwards by the edge of the machine wouldn't come out. They just wouldn't. It was as if Godzilla had tightened them.
Click to expand...

Yes, this was a problem on some 2006 Mac Pros. It's actually a manufacturing defect where Apple erroneously put Loctite between those screws and the metal standoffs below them, causing the standoffs to move along with the screws. The only way to really get them out is to use a really small set of needle nosed pliers to hold the standoff in place while unscrewing the screw. And there's really not a ton of room to do that in, either.

Glad you got thinks working though! :)
 
CaptainChunk said:
For movies, no. They don't come close to saturating even USB 2.0 bandwidth. Most commercial movies are in the neighborhood of 25-40Mbps data rate (roughly 3-5MBps); USB 2.0 is plenty fast for that.

For burning, maybe, provided you're burning discs at high speeds, like 8x or above.




Yes, this was a problem on some 2006 Mac Pros. It's actually a manufacturing defect where Apple erroneously put Loctite between those screws and the metal standoffs below them, causing the standoffs to move along with the screws. The only way to really get them out is to use a really small set of needle nosed pliers to hold the standoff in place while unscrewing the screw. And there's really not a ton of room to do that in, either.

Glad you got thinks working though! :)
Click to expand...

Yeah I read that in the instruction booklet that came with the drive, but I'm not sure if that was my problem.. because the screws just wouldn't move at all. It wasn't that they were turning the standoffs along with them, they were just completely stuck and unmovable.

The routing path my SATA cable goes through is slightly different than the one the instructions showed, due to my limitations, but it still ends up turning up behind the SATA connector of the first hard drive, and then into the optical bay, so I think it's fine.
 
Yeah I read that in the instruction booklet that came with the drive, but I'm not sure if that was my problem.. because the screws just wouldn't move at all. It wasn't that they were turning the standoffs along with them, they were just completely stuck and unmovable.
Click to expand...

Hmmm...maybe in your case, they applied Loctite to both the screws and the standoffs, rendering the screws impossible to move. Who knows...
 
In any case, the only Blu-Ray I've tried so far is The Shawshank Redemption, which works flawlessly, though I did notice in some scenes a teeny bit of some kind of barely-noticable flickering, identical to how it looks in a movie theater.. I don't know whether that's intentional in the case of this Blu-Ray transfer to make it look more like film, or if it's the software, or whatever. I'll be getting a handful more Blu-Rays from amazon next week so I'll be able to make comparisons.

edit: I really hope the new Mac Pro has a Blu-Ray BTO option. If not.. the optical drive bays will at least have SATA cables in there already by default, right?
 
That's good to know.

In any case, I'm really glad that the Mac Blu-Ray Player has come along far enough to make this feasible... the only gripe I have is that the simplified menu it presents doesn't let you know which audio track you're choosing.. it's either "English" or "English."

Does anyone know if the audio automatically gets "downscaled" to my 2.1 sound system? Or am I going to be missing channels?

The more I think about Apple's relationship with Blu-Ray, the more inexplicable it becomes. Surely Apple has always been known for trying to radically influence the technological landscape, but never before has any company said "we're going to completely and willfully ignore reality and pretend that what we offer is all the public wants" and developed a marketing strategy based on that. It's ludicrous, unacceptable, borderline criminal.
 
StephenCampbell said:
The more I think about Apple's relationship with Blu-Ray, the more inexplicable it becomes. Surely Apple has always been known for trying to radically influence the technological landscape, but never before has any company said "we're going to completely and willfully ignore reality and pretend that what we offer is all the public wants" and developed a marketing strategy based on that. It's ludicrous, unacceptable, borderline criminal.
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Bluray can't be licensed on platforms that have open source kernels. It's why Linux also doesn't have official Bluray, and why Apple isn't doing it. The confidential Bluray bits have to go into the kernel.

It's also why I have my doubts about the "official Bluray support." Mac OS X doesn't meet the Bluray Disc Association's standards for a supported platform, and the software does things that are flat out banned (like beaming Blurays to iOS devices, that's a huge huge no no in their rules.)
 
Well, at some point Apple will have to support it. Once they no longer feel threatened by it, and once more and more new releases are coming out on Blu-Ray only, they will support it.

Yesterday I watched a 1080p rental from iTunes, and today I watched a full movie on Blu-Ray, and the quality difference is quite noticeable. The iTunes download was 4.73GB. The Blu-Ray disc was 45GB.

The software works flawlessly. The film looks unbelievably gorgeous. As long as this can sustain for a reasonable length of time (until something better comes along, or until Apple supports it), I will be happy. My only gripe is the loudness of the Blu-Ray drive while a film is playing... it spins up the disc often.

Edit: By the time Apple supports it, it won't even be a big announcement.. it'll just be like "oh yeah.. you guys can have that now. We've been ****ing you for ten years now, we're gonna go get a snack and take a nap. You can watch Blu-Ray until we're back." I'll be happy though.
 
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StephenCampbell said:
Well, at some point Apple will have to support it. Once they no longer feel threatened by it, and once more and more new releases are coming out on Blu-Ray only, they will support it.

Yesterday I watched a 1080p rental from iTunes, and today I watched a full movie on Blu-Ray, and the quality difference is quite noticeable. The iTunes download was 4.73GB. The Blu-Ray disc was 45GB.

The software works flawlessly. The film looks unbelievably gorgeous. As long as this can sustain for a reasonable length of time (until something better comes along, or until Apple supports it), I will be happy.

Edit: By the time Apple supports it, it won't even be a big announcement.. it'll just be like "oh yeah.. you guys can have that now. We've been ****ing you for ten years now, we're gonna go get a snack and take a nap. You can watch Blu-Ray until we're back." I'll be happy though.
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goMac would be correct in his previous post. I'll also venture to say that Apple will never officially support Blu-ray. They're already gradually moving away from optical drives altogether. They want to sell/rent movies to you on iTunes. Period.

What doesn't help much is that average consumers don't care about video quality anymore. To them, HD is HD, and the convenience of instant streaming and not having to mess around with discs eclipses the differences in quality. Apple knows this, and this is why iTunes continues to be successful. It's sad, but true.

The same goes for downloadable music. In most cases, a CD sounds WAY better than the typical iTunes download to the trained ear. But how many CDs are people buying these days? Not nearly as many as they were buying 10 years ago, I'll tell you that. Again, convenience eclipses quality to the average consumer.
 
CaptainChunk said:
goMac would be correct in his previous post. I'll also venture to say that Apple will never officially support Blu-ray. They're already gradually moving away from optical drives altogether. They want to sell/rent movies to you on iTunes. Period.

What doesn't help much is that average consumers don't care about video quality anymore. To them, HD is HD, and the convenience of instant streaming and not having to mess around with discs eclipses the differences in quality. Apple knows this, and this is why iTunes continues to be successful. It's sad, but true.

The same goes for downloadable music. In most cases, a CD sounds WAY better than the typical iTunes download to the trained ear. But how many CDs are people buying these days? Not nearly as many as they were buying 10 years ago, I'll tell you that. Again, convenience eclipses quality to the average consumer.
Click to expand...

Then we must plant our feet firm in the ground and withstand the coming storm of degradation, decline, ignorance and idiocy, and let our very existences function as an act of defiance against irrationality and impulse-based psychology.

I just asked Macgo about the audio track selection in Mac Blu-Ray Player (about how you can't tell which track you're choosing), and one sentence of her response says this, speaking generally: "And our menu function will come out in a couple of months, not exceed the end of this year."

:)
 
For video distribution, I think within 5 years blu-ray will go the way of HD video, laser disks, vinyl LPs, only a cult following using specialized players. Even today Blu-Ray sales are dismal in spite of all the marketing. They have to give away players to get any disk sales. Blu-ray could continue to be used for PS game distribution. The market for video and audio for those that appreciate the highest quality may continue, there are still some BETA tape users out there, but the entry price will be high.

There really is no business case for apple to include Blu-Ray support, its a dying technology.
 
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