Get Macgo Blu-ray Player Pro from the Mac App Store - $64.99įree, fast, and functional: VLC + MakeMKVĬombining two easily available programs - the totally free, open-source video player VLC, and the free-while-in-beta Blu-ray ripper app MakeMKV - can let you play Blu-rays as well as Macgo's app, if not better.

I'm sure that's a dealbreaker for some folks, but most users probably won't lament it. The only shortfall I found in Macgo's app, besides its price, was its lack of support for 3D or 4K UHD Blu-rays. I couldn't tell or test whether Macgo's app was region-free, but I'd be surprised if it weren't. Macgo's app even supports BD-Live online features, though you'll have to go into the Preferences to turn that feature on it's switched off by default. The app offers hardware acceleration for smoother playback, though aside from loading speed, I didn't notice a difference in quality between it and Leawo's app. No one knows what those colored buttons are for, but Macgo's virtual remote has them anyway.ĭiscs loaded far faster than Leawo's player - 15 seconds, tops – and played the same pre-roll ads and trailers they would in a hardware player, though thankfully, I could skip them just as easily as I would elsewhere. But there are a few options respectable enough to make it into the Mac App Store - and an even better one that's (mostly) free. Unfortunately, searching for mac Blu-ray player online gets you a lot of highly suspect sites with creatively translated English, each pitching their own totally not-at-all-questionable video player that may or may not actually play Blu-ray discs. And once those drives became available, a few enterprising companies who did (presumably) pay up for the keys to decrypt Blu-ray discs released Mac apps to play regular Blu-ray movies with those drives. Apple never built Blu-ray drives into Macs, and eventually ditched optical drives altogether to focus on selling movies through iTunes.īut some Mac users still need to burn their own Blu-rays or read data off BD discs, so there are plenty of third-party Blu-ray drives available for the Mac. With his characteristic taciturn restraint, he publicly called the format a ' bag of hurt' and likened the groups behind it to the Mafia. Steve Jobs famously hated the licensing hurdles and hefty fees Blu-ray imposed. Our team of Apple experts have years of experience testing all kinds of tech and gadgets, so you can be sure our recommendations and criticisms are accurate and helpful.

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