State of Blu-ray support

When Apple announced they were joining or at least supporting the Blu-ray effort, many Macintosh news sites speculated on when the technology would find its way into our favorite operating system. With the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD the arguments would sway, but after the fall of HD DVD, people expected a rather swift adoption of the technology by Apple. To date this has not yet happened, and many are curious about the options they have for using Blu-ray in their Macs. Clues in the code in Mac OS X show that Apple is working on Blu-ray support, but since Apple does not yet support Blu-ray, people who wish to use it will need to use a third-party solution.

The software setup

Currently, there are only a few consumer Blu-ray options for the Mac, with the more robust solution being Roxio's "Toast" software that will let you to author HD content if you purchase an additional Blu-Ray plug-in (depending on the version). Overall, the Toast solution will cost about $150 if you want to manage HD video, and if you choose to go with the previous version of Toast, while it supports writing data to Blu-ray, it does not support video encoding and burning. A cheaper alternative to Toast is "RevolverHD", which will take an iMovie project and record it to Blu-ray media and costs abotu $40.

As for viewing Blu-ray content, you are out of luck on the Mac side. The options for Windows are limited as well, but there are a few players out there: PowerDVD, AnyDVD HD (for removing BD copy protection). Fortunately, you can use these software packages with your machine to play Blu-ray movies by running Windows in Boot Camp. While some have desired to do this in virtualized environments, such as Parallels and VMware, currently the virtualization solutions are limited in graphics processing performance and movie playback is not possible. If you would like to get Blu-ray to work on your machine (albeit in windows), in addition to setting up Windows on a separate partition, the next thing you will need to consider is hardware.

The hardware setup

You will need a Blu-ray drive. For Mac Pros you can install an internal drive, and for other Macs that do not have standard 5.25-inch drive bays, you can get a drive in an external enclosure. Some options are available at Other World Computing, and MCE technologies just came out with a Mac-taylored BD drive of their own.

Beyond the drive, you will also need to have a video card that is HDCP compliant. Unfortunately, Blu-ray is wrought with proprietary technology that requires licensing and fees, and as a result they have implemented copy protection that restricts playback on certain devices. If your video card is not compliant, you will need to either update it, or unlock the movies you are trying to watch using "AnyDVD HD" software that can be run in Boot Camp under Windows Vista. This apparently will need to be done for the GeForce 7300 that shipped with previous generation Mac Pros, but people with ATI cards in their Mac Pros should be able to view movies. Be sure you have the latest drivers for your video card from either Nvidia or ATI.

The third thing you will need is to ensure your monitor connection is HDCP compliant as well. Most DVI monitors should work fine, but if you use adaptors to connect your monitors you may run into problems. As with the video card, you should be able to clear this problem on the movies you own by using the "AnyDVD HD" suite.

The Big Picture

Overall, viewing Blu-ray disks on your machine is currently not as well implemented as people expected by this time, and is a major work in progress. Even windows solutions aren't as elegant as they should be, and hopefully Apple will jump on the opportunity to make a well-implemented Blu-ray solution sometime in the near future. With Apple in the digital media business, and having focus on home entertainment and productivity with the iMovie and iDVD software packages (as well as professional solutions for this software), we expect an elegant solution to come from Apple when the time is right. As it stands, however, the most straightforward way to use Blu-ray these days is to view movies through a standalone player, and then use your computer solely to burn Blu-ray media.

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