4k Blu Ray Player Software For Mac

Since the late '90s, Macs have welcomed DVD movies. Pop a disc in your drive, watch Apple's DVD Player app open, and enjoy the show. Simple. But DVDs' high-definition successors, Blu-rays, never got the same warm reception. Today, the right third-party hardware and software will let you play Blu-ray discs on your Mac. But, uh … maybe you shouldn't?

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Steve Jobs famously hated the licensing hurdles and hefty fees Blu-ray imposed. With his characteristic taciturn restraint, he publicly called the format a 'bag of hurt' and likened the groups behind it to the Mafia. Apple never built Blu-ray drives into Macs, and eventually ditched optical drives altogether to focus on selling movies through iTunes.

But 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. 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.

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. But there are a few options respectable enough to make it into the Mac App Store. We'll discuss those in a moment, but first, let's talk about another app that sounds like a good idea, but really isn't.

Blu-rays on VLC

VLC is a justly beloved open-source video player — free, robust, and able to play tons of different formats. With the right tinkering, Blu-ray can be one of them. But playing Blu-rays on VLC is like free-climbing a skyscraper without safety equipment: Sure, it's technically possible, but it's also incredibly difficult, full of drawbacks, and almost certainly a bad idea.

For starters, the site I originally used to find the right files that would supposedly enable Blu-ray playback on VLC is, as of this writing, no longer capable of establishing secure connections. (Which is why I'm not linking to it here.)

When it was up and running, its sparse instructions didn't seem to work, and I had to go digging for another site's advice to get VLC playing even sort of nice with Blu-ray. Then I had to separately install Java to have any hope of getting Blu-ray interactive menus working.

Even after all that, VLC wouldn't play most discs I tried with it, ominously warning me of revoked certificates and other things that sound like they involve well-paid lawyers. And when it did play discs, it refused to let me skip past the annoying preview video tracks before the movie; sometimes, trying to do so just dumped me back at the beginning of them.

VLC works great for lots of things. Blu-ray playback isn't one of them. Just don't do it. Especially when you've got another free and far more legitimate option waiting for you in the Mac App Store.

Best computer blu ray software

Leawo Blu-ray Player

The two currently available Mac Blu-ray apps come from Chinese companies. Shenzhen-based Leawo's is by far the cheaper – as in, it's free – and while it's perfectly adequate, you definitely get what you pay for.

I tested Leawo's player with a selection of discs from every major studio (plus Criterion, for you cinephiles out there), ranging from titles I bought back in 2009 to discs released in 2018. They all played just fine, with a crisp picture and clear sound. Leawo's menus let me easily switch audio and subtitle tracks, and jump between different video files on the disc with a Playlist option. And unlike hardware Blu-ray players, it's not region-locked, so you can watch discs from all over the world.

But bones don't get much barer than Leawo's offering. It doesn't support Blu-ray menus at all; if you want to view special features, you'll need to guess at their location from the Playlist menu. If you're dying to watch, say, The Sound of Music's pop-over interactive commentary with sing-along mode, Leawo's app will not be one of your favorite things.

The app takes a solid minute (I timed it) just to load a disc, a process that requires multiple un-intuitive menu clicks, and whoever ported it into Mac didn't bother to change the drab Windows-like interface.

If you just want to watch Blu-rays on your Mac, Leawo will definitely do that. It's perfectly serviceable. It doesn't seem to install spyware or bother you with ads. But there's a better (and considerably more expensive) choice if you want a more robust experience.

Macgo Blu-ray Player Pro

Free Blu Ray Player Software

Hong Kong-based Macgo's Blu-ray Player Pro usually sells for a whopping $79.95, though you can watch for frequent sales that will knock the price down to a still-lofty $39.95. On the App Store, with a 'family' license to run on multiple Macs, it'll cost you $64.99. (There's a marginally cheaper non-Pro version, but like Leawo's app, it doesn't fully support menus, so why bother?)

For that price, you'll get an experience nearly identical to popping a disc into any regular Blu-ray player. Macgo's app played my test discs flawlessly, with full support for menus and a virtual remote that even mirrored the what-are-they-even-there-for red, blue, green, and yellow buttons on the average Blu-ray remote. Its interface isn't Mac-like, but it's clean, intuitive, and unobtrusively minimal.

Discs loaded quickly — 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. 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. 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. I couldn't tell or test whether Macgo's app was region-free, but I'd be surprised if it weren't.

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'm sure that's a dealbreaker for some folks, but most users probably won't lament it.

Maybe just don't

In hindsight, Steve Jobs may have been right to keep Blu-ray drives out of Macs. On a laptop screen, you may not be able to fully enjoy the HD splendor of a great Blu-ray picture. (And hauling around an external drive plus discs would make the experience a lot less portable.) Desktop Macs with big screens already have Netflix, iTunes, and lots of other less noisy and expensive ways to watch HD movies.

For the same $120 - $180 you'd shell out for Macgo's app and a good external drive, you could buy a decent Blu-ray player to hook up to your big-screen TV. (Reputable names like Sony and LG offer region-free players you can score for $100 or less with a little comparison-shopping.)

If you don't own a TV or a Blu-ray player, do own a Mac, already own an external Blu-ray drive for some other purpose – like ripping the Blu-ray discs you own for your personal digital collection – and really, really want to watch Blu-rays specifically off the discs, you'll likely be pleased with Macgo's app, and reasonably satisfied with Leawo's.

But with so many other, less troublesome ways to watch movies on your Mac, maybe you're better off leaving this particular bag of hurt alone.

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In our precious article, we covered the topic about playing 4K Blu-ray on PC with Ultra HD Blu-ray Player Software for Windows and 4K Blu-ray Ripper software. In this article, we will focus on the point of playing UHD Blu-ray movies on Mac platform.

Play 4K UHD Blu-ray on Mac with Blu-ray Player software

To play 4K UHD Blu-ray on Mac, you will first need a 4K Blu-ray drive that can read the UHD Blu-ray disc. After connecting the 4K Blu-ray drive to your Mac computer, then all you need is an app to play the Ultra HD movies. Here, you can use Leo Blu-ray Player which is available from Mac App Store, Macgo Blu-ray Player Pro or Aiseesoft Mac Blu-ray Player software.

With Mac UHD Blu-ray Player installed, just insert your 4K Blu-ray disc or click Open File in the app and browse to your 4K Blu-ray disc to get started. After the movie is loaded, you can click around the main menu normally, or use the app’s built-in navigation panel to choose chapters to view, select your audio settings, and enable subtitles.

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Rip 4K Blu-ray for Mac Viewing with 4K Player Software for Mac (masOS High Sierra)

For those people who wish to protect your precious 4K Blu-ray disc from scratched or damaged, it would be a good option for you to rip 4K Blu-ray movies into digital file formats for storing on your Mac local hard drive, you can then directly view the digital movies with media player software installed on your Mac computer without touching the original Ultra HD Blu-ray disc.

To rip 4K Blu-ray on Mac, you will need a Mac 4K Blu-ray Ripper application. Although there are some Mac Blu-ray Ripper programs on the market, however, a lot of them lacks the ability to handle UHD Blu-ray disc. Fortunately, here comes Pavtube BDMagic for Mac, which not only helps to automatically bypass the copy protection and region codec on 4K Blu-ray disc/BDMV folder/ISO image file with the built-in decrypter, but also assists you to make a digital copy of the content on 4K Blu-ray disc and save as various different file formats.

If you wish to backup 4K Blu-ray on Mac with no quality loss, it would be much ideal for you to make a 1:1 full disc copy of UHD Blu-ray with original structure or remux 4K Blu-ray to a container file format without codec transcoding. If you care much about disc ripping time and space occupation, then a main movie copy of 4K Blu-ray disc will copy UHD Blu-ray to H.265 digital file with small file size and also will save a lot of time by only scanning and ripping the main movie content instead of the whole. If you wish to play the UHD Blu-ray movie on Mac with 4K media player software such as VLC, Divx Player, KMPlayer, 5K Player, etc, just use our program to rip 4K Blu-ray to 4K digital file formats like 4K AVI/WMV/MP4/MOV/MKV/H.264/H.265, etc.

For

Tips: If you happen to own an old Mac computer or you wish to play the ripped UHD Blu-ray movies on some non 4K capable media player installed such as QuickTime Player installed on Mac computer, you can also choose to compress 4K UHD Blu-ray to 1080p/720p digital video by outputting a HD file format such as H.264 HD MP4, H.264 HD MOV, H.265 HD MP4, MEPG-4 HD, MPEG-2 HD, MEPG-TS HD, MKV HD, WMV HD, Divx HD, AVI HD, BDAV HD for smooth playback experience.

For those people who have just upgraded to the new macOS Sierra, you can feel free to download and install this 4K Blu-ray Ripper application on your new OS thanks to its perfect OS compatibility. In addition, the program also keeps constant with powerful capability to bypass the new encryption such as MKB61 and MKB62. The last important point, the results produced by the program are high quality, if you choose the highest possible video quality, you can’t tell the difference between the ripped video and the original 4K UHD Blu-ray movies.

How to Rip and Play UHD Blu-ray Movies on Mac (masOS High Sierra)?

Step 1: Load UHD Blu-ray disc.

Insert the UHD Blu-ray disc into an external 4K Blu-ray drive, then press “File” > “Load from disc” option on the main interface to load 4K Blu-ray disc into the program, alternatively, you can also import 4K Blu-ray folder or 4K Blu-ray ISO files with the program.

Step 2: Backup UHD Blu-ray to Mac in various ways.

Full UHD Blu-ray disc copy

On the top tool bar of the main interface, use the option to make an entire disc copy of original 4K Blu-ray disc structure without changing anything.

Main movie copy of 4K Blu-ray

From “Format” bar drop-down list, select “Copy” > “Direct” Copy, you can then copy the selected movie file in its original format without quality loss. When directly copy a 4K Blu-ray title, you will get .h.265 as output.

Best 4k Blu Ray Player 2019

Rip UHD Blu-ray to popular 4K digital file format

Click “Format” bar, from its drop-down list, select one of your desired 4K file format such as “H.264 High Profile Video(*.mp4)” under “Common Video” main category. You can also choose other 4K file formats according to your own needs.

4k Blu Ray Player Software For Mac

Output UHD Blu-ray Blu-ray to HD digital format

You can also choose to rip 4K UHD to HD digital file formats such as “H.264 HD Video(*.mp4)” > “HD Video” for smoothly viewing on slow Mac computer or non-4K capable media player software.

External 4k Blu Ray Drive

Tips: Click “Settings” on the main interface to open “Profile Settings” window, here, you can flexibly choose or specify exactly the parameters including video codec, resolution, bit rate, frame rate, audio codec, bit rate, sample rate, channels, etc as you like to get better output video and audio quality.

Step 3: Begin the final conversion process.

4k Blu Ray Player Software

After all setting is completed, hit the “Convert” button at the right bottom of the main interface to begin the conversion process from 4K UHD Blu-ray to 4K or HD digital file format.

Best Computer Blu Ray Software

When the conversion is finished, click “Open Output Folder” icon on the main interface to open the folder with generated files. Then you will have no limitation to enjoy 4K Blu-ray movies on your Mac computer with 4K or HD media player software with perfect quality.

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