Despite Apple Macs still not including Blu-ray disc capable drives and Steve Jobs’s famous statement from late 2008, claiming the technology amounted to a “bag of hurt”, OS X users are finding a growing number of options for using the media with their systems. For quite a while now, Blu-ray capable players and recorders have been available for Macs from third party vendors like Other World Computing. On the software side, the popular CD and DVD recording software Roxio Toast supports recording data to Blu-ray media as well. Beyond that, OS X users have lacked the ability to actually play a high-def movie from a Blu-ray disc. Now, it appears there’s a new solution on the market to bring Blu-ray movies to your Mac.
For $39.95, you can purchase Blu-ray player software from a company named Macgo. As well as having the ability to play Blu-ray movies in high-definition, it’s also backwards-compatible with standard DVD movies, as well as several popular video file formats (including AVI, FLV, MKV, MOV, VideoCD, WMA, MP4, and MPEG) and features Facebook and Twitter integration for easy posting of comments about movies you’ve just watched. The only catch I see with this product is that it requires an internet connection to play Blu-ray media, because it appears you have to get the decryption keys for the movies over the Internet instead of having one built into the software application itself.
If you’re interested in ripping the video content from a Blu-ray movie disc to save on your Mac’s hard drive (possibly with intent to transcode it later into another format?), a free solution is available, albeit only as a beta version, with a product called MakeMKV. It won’t do the video transcoding/conversion to other file formats, but it decrypts the original content and saves it for you. Free players like VLC can then play the high-def content as-is, if you so desire, or the OS X based media center software Plex can play the resulting MKV data files as well. Maybe your goal is transcoding to a smaller video file for use with a portable device like an iPad or a smartphone, or you want to record to a standard DVD disc? You can accomplish the conversion with the free Handbrake software.
At this point, it seems clear that Apple has little interest in their customers using Blu-ray disc technology, because they would prefer to sell or rent high-definition movie content digitally, via the iTunes store. Nevertheless, it’s becoming increasingly feasible to add the capability oneself at nominal cost.
Between Blue Ray and the “consumering” of Final Cut, I think it seems clear that Apple doesn’t care as much about professional media creation as was once thought.
Brian, yeah, that’s one way you could interpret things. But I think it’s also worth pointing out that even Microsoft didn’t include the ability for users to play back a standard DVD movie in Windows ’95, ’98, ME, 2000 or even XP! It wasn’t until Vista that they finally incorporated it. Companies like Toshiba and Dell were always pre-loading 3rd. party DVD movie player applications before that, since they knew users expected to have that functionality.
Final Cut Pro X might make a good topic for another article. But personally? I think what you’re really seeing is technology advancing to the point where the consumer can start playing with video technologies that used to be relegated ONLY to the “pro” segment of the marketplace. Apple sees an opportunity there, building “prosumer” type tools to work with HD content, cameras that save photos in RAW format, etc. – while making all of it reasonably accessible to the average user.
I mean, just 10 years ago, video professionals would have laughed if you told them consumers would be experimenting at home with “blue screen” technology to superimpose their images on looped background video. Now, it’s a built-in special effects feature in iChat!
The problem for Apple is figuring out how to address this growing, new market segment. It seems to me they have a general goal of making one product that’s suitable for BOTH the high-end pros AND the prosumers out there. Unfortunately, it’ll probably take a while to hammer such a thing into shape, and FCP X is just the very first experiment with doing that to their video editing product. I don’t know if the “pros” will jump ship before Apple can succeed in pleasing them or not?