Play back Blu-Ray movie discs on a Mac

Let me just say right off the bat that OS/X for Mac does NOT have native support for playback of production Blu-Ray movie discs. What we have here are some “creative” solutions if you have an external Blu-Ray drive for your Mac and you want the ability not only to burn to but to play back good quality blu-ray movies (have your cake and eat it as well).

WARNING: this process will include possible Microsoft OS additions to your Mac. So if you are a Mac purist, or you just hate Bill Gates’ guts, step away right now and be resigned to the fact that you have to wait until Steve Jobs changes his mind about this “bag of hurt”.

Step 1: the Mac OS/X Blu-Ray problem

• Step 1a is actually the first choice, which is to dual-boot your MacBook or MacBook Pro with Vista OS, since Mac OS/X does not have software for Blu-Ray decoding. I know some of you might feel like this is putting dirt and scum on your Mac, but hey, Vista actually packs some Blu-Ray goodness, so either swallow it up or spit it out.
• Step 1b would be to have an OS virtualization app running in OS/X — like BootCamp or Parallels — to run Vista.

Step 2: Playback of Blu-Ray movies

• Install and run any of the huge number of PC software out there with Blu-Ray decoding capabilities — like WinDVD or PowerDVD — on your Vista environment, whichever option you did pick.

And there you go — Blu-Ray playback on your Mac. Not very elegant, we would agree. But it does tide you over until those heads in Cupertino can get their acts together on the Blu-Ray issue.

And did I mention you need an external Blu-Ray drive on your Mac for this? Yeah, of course I did.