How do you convert the Blu-ray movies? Is there a player that connects to the iMac? I started putting my DVDs in iTunes, but gave up when I started buying everything in Blu-ray.
Indeed there is a Blu-ray player that works with the Mac, or several I should say. The one I purchased is the LG BE14NU40 14x External Blu-ray Disc Rewriter from B&H Photo. It's currently selling for $120 there. There are much cheaper alternatives available if you don't require the ability to author Blu-rays, just read them, so check around if that's all you want to do. You should be able to find a good one for less than $50.
In order to use a Blu-rays on the Mac, you simply need programs that supply a driver for it, since Apple never made one of their own or supported Blu-ray in any way.
To author Blu-rays, you can use Toast 12 Titanium or Toast 12 Pro and buy the $20 Blu-ray plug-in made for that purpose.
To play Blu-ray disks directly on the Mac, I purchased Mac Blu-ray Player from Macgo, it's $40 using their online coupon. It's regularly updated for new Blu-ray releases and bug fixes and supports nearly all video file formats you can throw at it.
To rip Blu-ray movies to disk, you can be rip to MKV, a very high quality video file format that has no resolution loss when taken from a Blu-ray disc. Then simply play them on the Mac itself. I use MakeMKV for ripping purposes. You can also simply use Handbrake in conjunction with MakeMKV if you choose. Here's an article about using Handbrake to convert Blu-rays to MKV.
Keep in mind that Blu-rays can hold a huge amount of data on the compared to DVDs, from 25GB to 50GB worth. MKV's themselves can take up a lot of space too, depending on the options you choose, like having the surround sound audio tracks included. For example, an MKV file taken from my Mean Girls Blu-ray takes up 25.8GB of disk space on my Mac, because I included the 5.1 surround sound audio within the file (audio is not compressed on Blu-ray discs like it is on DVD, so it takes up a lot of space).
Also, of course, the MKV can be converted to MP4 format using Handbrake or another conversion program of your liking. You may be able to convert directly from Blu-ray to MP4, I have not tried this.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions. |
