“Apple was an early signee to Blu-ray Disc Association membership at the start of the 21st century. Yet the Mac company never did pursue the playback of Blu-ray films on its computers – or at least, not quite as far as releasing any hard or software for users for the very task,” Andrew Harrison reports for PC Advisor. “Thankfully, Macgo Mac Blu-ray Player is now available for the task.”
Harrison reports, “‘Blu-ray is a bag of hurt,’ quoth the late Steve Jobs when asked still why no Blu-ray for Macs. ‘I don’t mean from the consumer point of view. It’s great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex. We’re waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off before we burden our customers with the cost of licensing and the cost of drives.'”
“While open-source projects have been refining the playback of all manner of commercial video and audio codecs, Macgo’s app (US$49.95) is the first to combine all the essential libraries with the decryption keys and tools to unlock Blu-ray’s gorgeous high-definition content,” Harrison reports.
Read more in the full review here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
I hope they use some of the proceeds to hire a better translator. The English on that site is terrible. I’ve seen phishing scams with better grammar.
The site is pcadvisor.co.uk, so they are speaking the Queen’s English. Real English. English English to you.
News? Mac is dying and all discs are already dead… move on.
Discs are dead? Not as long as there are bargain bins and used disc shops.
HAHAHAHA!
Yeah. Mac has been ‘dying’ since 1984. Darn, that hasn’t happened. Instead it has been eating Windows market share for years. Yes, that’s a fact you can go verify on your own, little trolls.
And yeah. All discs have been dead since I first read that rant over two years ago. And yet, darn! Hard drives remains the overwhelming method of data storage. Burned optical discs remains a primary method of physical backup in part because they are incredibly faster then backups to the cloud, are portable, easy to catalog and store.
I remember a year ago people saying that USB flash drives were going to replace DVD data discs. I continue to just laugh. 😆
What really IS dead? Tape backup. There isn’t much of that around these days. By the end of this year, Android isn’t going to be on two legs either, after it’s suitable gutted by lawsuits. I’m looking forward to that fun.
And oh yeah! What format provides the BEST quality of music?
– Vinyl? HAHAHAHA! Snap! Crackle! Pop! RuMMbLe.
– MP3s and other lossy compression formats? I don’t think so!
– CDs: *DING* That is correct! Well, as long as some corporate dingbat doesn’t EQ the recording to hell.
Q: What is even better than CD audio?
A: DVD audio at 96,000 samples per second, over DOUBLE the sampling rate than the CD standard. The sampling rate available on any standard computer. That’s what I want!
But the RIAA doesn’t like that, not without massive DRM infection! So F*CK the RIAA and do it independently, real music artists! No more slavery to the corporate overlords! Hurray, hurray. 😀
Convenience and iTunes Match (backup)… over quality, anyday.
Do you need a single 300MB RAW photo? or a good resolution compressed jpg?
iOS over OSX… the days are coming. Kill mouse… big resolution, big pixel (zoom) a finger is enough…. kill keyboard (long texts) just speech the text.
It is Okay if Apple doesn’t want to deliver Macs with optical drives like Blu-ray, but they MUST make OS X compatible with this technology.
Why don’t they produce a consumer and a professional software specific for Blu-Ray authoring?
Everybody have tons of GB of HD-Video on hard drives and SD cards that just can be stored and played from cheap BD-R discs!!!
Probably not many regular consumers know this but Windows doesn’t even play regular DVD’s out of the box. You have to buy software (WinDVD, PowerDVD). Of course, Dell, etc would be stupid to include a DVD drive, but not include software, and if WM player sees that you have a DVD codec installed, it will play DVD’s. That gives the impression that “Windows plays DVD’s out of the box.”
A lot of people also think that Windows comes with Word, just b/c most OEM’s install Office. Minesweeper, yes, Minesweeper does come out of the box.
but they MUST make OS X compatible with this technology.
No, Apple must NOT. Go study what Microsoft perpetrated in Windows, starting with Vista, in order to make their OS Blu-ray friendly, aka USER-HOSTILE, aka DRM friendly. It’s sick and twisted.
THANK YOU Steve Jobs for IGNORING Sony’s DRM obsession. It’s not welcome in my home. It never will be. No one imposes surveillance over what I do with MY media. No one. F*ck off Sony.
“Everybody have tons of GB of HD-Video on hard drives and SD cards that just can be stored and played from cheap BD-R discs!!!”
I don’t, and I honestly couldn’t give a crap about BluRay, and I don’t have ‘tons of GB (sic)’ on any HDD, flash drive, SD card, or otherwise. I’m sure there are plenty who do, but I know plenty who don’t.
Why would I want to own the BlueRay disk? For less money I can rent it. I usually only ever watch a movie once. For needing to play it over and over I have Habitual Box Office & Blowtime that plays movie on demand for many many years. Many of which are craptacula favorites from the 60 and 70’s. I love to watch Giant Spider invasion on HBO or Blowtime one of the best scifi movie made in 1975. (Not).
Classics like Action Jackson, An American Tale, Blood and Sand, The breakfast club, Can Can, Cat People, Cocoon 1 & 2.
The point is yet another poorly programmed network begging to be taken down. Right now they all suck and they could all be better. If I want want to see old Movies I have a service for that. Even netflix is good for that. So why would I want the blue ray when I can buy it and store it for free in the cloud? I can already watch it on all my iTunes enabled machines and devices. Soon maybe on my Apple ITV. If I want to spend money on a new format just for the sake of the new format whats the point. The music companies ripped everybody off on tape2cd and this is yet another grab to a new format to give people the option to own it on blue ray. I will continue to convert all my DVD’s to MP4 put them up on the 12TB Family server and let everyone in the house whatever they want when they want. If we need a movie to own I will buy it because its the movie I want to watch over and over but that is so very very rare for most consumers. The point of owning a movie was so you could watch it anytime you wanted
With Apple and netflix I pretty much already can and for a lot less money.
I have pretty much stopped buying DVDs, either standard or Blu-Ray. It’s much easier and cheaper to rent the movie you want, even if you rent it a couple of times. Few movies get watched multiple times, even ones that the kids really like (they’re not 4 any more).
I have had a ton of problems with my Samsung Blu-Ray player freezing Blu-Ray movies. Software updates haven’t helped. I’m sure it’s because it’s a Samsung DVD player, but at this point I don’t know if I want to replace it when 1080p movies are very close to being the standard download format for my AppleTV.
Plus, with my AppleTV, I don’t even have to leave the house.
when 1080p movies are very close to being the standard download format for my AppleTV
But just because something is 1080p doesn’t mean it looks as good as Blu-Ray. This is akin to taking an un-compressed audio file, and making it into an mp3 file. You can have a very low bit rate mp3 file, and a very high nitrate mp3 file…. and they will sound different. Perhaps not to your ears, but the file sizes are very different, so transmitting the larger one costs more. Same thing with 1080p. You can encode it at a low bit rate and stream it easily enough, and it’ll look ok… or you can encode it at a higher bit rate that would be impossible to stream or download, but would fit on a BluRay disc, and look better.
While you may not appreciate the visual and audio differences, there are others who do.
just think about all of those HD family videos capture with cameras, camcorders, iPhones, whatever-phones…
and think about those companies that produce HD videos TV, enterprises, etc….
those guys really need to burn, back up, deliver, duplicate those TONS of GB of HD material.
God bless Blu-ray … and the future 5K discs!
Why Does Blu-ray Suck?
DRM: Digital Rights Manglement.
Get rid of DRM customer abuse and I’ll care. Do you hear that Sony? Ya, but you don’t care. That’s what I call stalemate symmetry.
plastic suck
Mac is certainly alive and well, despite silly glitches such as blueray compatibility. Just walk by ANY MAC store and see for yourself.