Solutions to watch Blu-ray movies on Mac and WD TV

Not an easy thing for Mac users to play back Blu-ray movies, even they are your personal purchasing. I’ve summarized three ways that Mac users have usually used to playback Blu-ray movies as following. Frankly speaking, the former two solutions seems a little troublesome, personally, I prefer the last one.

Solution 1: With the help of AnyDVD HD via Windows:

Requirements:

- A Windows PC with a built-in Blu-ray drive or an external BD drive.

- AnyDVD HD

- A Mac: MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, or Mac Pro

- Latest VLC media player or MPlayer

How-To:

1. Insert your Blu-ray disc to the BD drive, and run AnyDVD HD to remove copyright protections of your disc, no matter what kinds of protections your BD discs adopted, BD+, or AACS, AnyDVD HD is capable of dealing with them. Then you will get unprotected.m2ts files after the access of AnyDVD HD.

2. Copy the .m2ts files to an external drive or a USB stick, whatever, just let the Mac be able to read them.

3. Use the latest VLC media player or MPlayer to play unprotected .m2ts files.

Solution 2: Running Windows on Mac via Boot Camp

What you will need:

- A BD drive

- A Mac

- Blu-ray playback software on Windows, like Cyberlink PowerDVD 9 Ultra

How-To:

1. Install Boot Camp and Windows

I do not mention too much about this process, because Apple has already given the full direction about it here.

2. Connect BD drive with your computer, and Playback Blu-ray via PowerDVD 9 Ultra on the newly installed Windows OS.

Solution 3: Rip BD with Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper for Mac

What you will need:

- A BD drive

- Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper for Mac

This ripper provides directly copy function as well as HD video output option, so there is no need to worry about the output file quality of your Blu-ray movie.

The above two methods are all depending on the assistant of Windows, while the third one is not, thus I’d like to show the detailed operating steps about this one in detail.

Easy-to-use steps:

1. Load BD files through “DVD Folder” or “IFO File”.

2. Select audio track from the pull down menu of “Audio”, both Dolby TrueHD audio and DTS-HD Master Audio are supported.

3. Click the drop-down list of “Format” to select output format. Directly copy, HD video, iPhone, iPod, PS3, and many other devices and formats are all supported.

4. Click “Settings” button to adjust audio and video parameters like codec name, bit rate, aspect ration, frame rate, sample rate, and audio channels(5.1 channels is included).

5. Click “Browse” button to specify save path.

6. Click “Convert” button to start conversion.

Once the conversion is done, you are able to find out the output files via clicking “Open” button. If you choose directly copy, you can use VLC or MPlayer to play the output .m2ts files, if you converted to other usual formats, like mov, mp4, then you can use QuickTime player or whatever to play back them.

Via the Blu-Ray Ripper for Mac mentioned in solution 3, you can also absolutely realize playback BD movies on your HDTV with WD TV. Both WD TV Live HD Media Player and WD TV HD Media Player are all workable with .m2ts files, and they also support Full HD resolutions up to 1080P in common. In order to reserve the HD audio and video quality of your BD movie, you can completely select “Copy”> “Directly Copy” to just get the .m2ts files as the original as long as your USB device has enough space to store the output files. If not, you can also consider converting BD to a HD video format to save space as well as keep HD quality of the source file.

Well, hope the above contents are helpful.