Tutorial: How to play Bluray movie discs on your Mac

[Kaido]

This is a tutorial for how to play store-bought Bluray movie discs on a Mac. If you want to rip movies (to MKV), check out MakeMKV ($50). However, this tutorial simply for playing back official discs on your computer. You need 3 things:

1. Bluray drive
2. Bluray playback software
3. Internet connection

For starters, you will need a Bluray computer drive. I have this external model: ($70)

http://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-SE-506CB-RSWD-Blu-ray-External/dp/B00INGA7ZG

It burns & reads CD, DVD, and Bluray discs. Also, it only requires a single USB port (no power cord), which is convenient. Second, you'll need some playback software. I have the MacGo Bluray player software: ($40)

http://www.macblurayplayer.com/

I bought mine in a bundle with a lifetime Mac license & lifetime Windows license for $55. Test on both an OS X machine (10.8.5 Mountain Lion Hackintosh) and Windows machine (Windows 10 Home laptop) successfully using the MacGo Bluray player software & USB Bluray disc player. The software supports OS X 1.6 to 10.11 & Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10. The software has some other neat features, but for the purposes of this tutorial - yes, it does play official, store-bought Bluray discs (also supports BD, Blu-ray Menu, ISO files, and BDMV folders). Also, it worked fine on my Hackintosh & on my DVI-connected (not HDMI) 24" 1080p Dell monitor, no HDCP errors. Regarding performance:

Is the picture quality of the output video as good as the original Blu-ray video?

Mac Blu-ray Player can directly play Blu-ray disc and DVD without any quality loss.
It allows full preservation of all audio tracks (like DTS HD Audio, Dolby TrueHD Audio, etc.), subs streams, chapter markers and videos.

As far as Internet connections go, the program initially takes a few seconds to connect to their US-based servers to (legally) remove the Bluray copy protection. They are legally licensed:

Macgo International Limited has the legal authorization from Blu-ray Disc Association. The internet connection is needed to remove the Blu-ray protection after accessing to Macgo server. Users who have the same disc do not have to remove the Blu-ray protection twice.

Regarding the Internet connection:

Can I play Blu-ray discs if I turn off the upgrade pop-up windows?

We recommend you to update it at best. Because the AACS key requires periodical updates for content protection reasons.

Blu-ray Discs have adopted AACS (Advanced Access Content System) to protect the digital content. AACS keys are required to play some Blu-ray Discs titles. So Mac Blu-ray Player may not be able to play Blu-ray Disc if you declined to update it.

So that's it. Get a Bluray drive, get the MacGo software, and have an active Internet connection for first-time playback of each movie. Then pop in a disc & enjoy watching a Bluray movie! I am not a big fan of the Bluray format (I prefer just getting HD movies on VUDU or similar services) because it's kind of clunky, but my family gets Bluray movie discs occasionally, so this is a handy setup to have. If you'd prefer ripping your Bluray, you can use something like MakeMKV to decrypt & encode the video file for later playback (or streaming with something like PLEX). There may be other Bluray player software out there, so if you know of any legit ones, feel free to post. I have personally tested MacGo & seen it work, so I can vouch for it. It's also pretty simple, which is nice. I was looking for an alternative for PowerDVD on Windows & found MacGo and ended up purchasing the combo license for both Windows & Mac. Not bad if you need legal Bluray playback on your computer!