New Windows 7 ad criticizes Apple's lack of Blu-ray support on Mac - Page 9

This is why.

"Nope"

I wasn't comparing. There is no comparison. Apples and oranges.

I was linking to Dell computers that offer a Blu-Ray option. No MacBook offers a Blu-Ray option. There is no comparison.

There seems to be some psychological effect of wanting an option even though youll never use it. The same happened with AIO desktops and notebooks, which are portable forms of AIO computers.

The old school users complained that you can your options for upgrading your machines are limited and they claimed these would never catch on, but they did as they offer a convenience that matters to people. Id bet most of these people eventually bought notebooks, too, even though they couldnt replace or upgrade all the HW themselves.

This seems to be the same psychology. I doubt any of the people on this forum clamoring for a $500+ Blu-ray drive would ever buy on from Apple, but they want the option anyway. What makes it worse is the lack of these posters requesting support for Macs in the software or from 3rd-party HW vendors. Why it has to be Apple and as a factory option is what make me scratch my head.

But its ultimately a moot point, because we all know that Apple will be pulling the optical drive before too long. But who knows, once that happens Apple might be a strategic position to offer an external Blu-ray player that could be 12.7mm instead of 9.5mm, thus reducing the cost by hundreds and not interfering with their digital download service though I doubt it.

There complaint isnt that Blu-ray doesnt work great on Macs, but that 1) Apple doesnt offer it, and 2) You cant watch a protected Blu-ray movie on a Mac due to AACS. Ive been told that AACS can be used in an app, not in the OS itself and it will play fine, but there are no such apps for Macs that Im aware of.

As for your setup, M2TS is an MPEG2 video codec for HD.Technically all codecs work fine for Blu-ray as its just an optical storage medium, but M2TS, H.264 and VC-1 are the most common for video playback on standalone players because they are limited to the codecs they understand.

I wish more people would focus on finding solutions, like you did, instead of focusing on finding problems that everyone else should resolve.

Will the Macs DVD player playback M2TS files or do you need a separate app for your Mac?

Lol+1

I've got a Blu-Ray playing PS3, but I've also got an Apple TV, iPhone and other Apple products.

I often have to weigh up whether to buy a film or TV show on Blu-Ray or via the iTunes store. More and more I find myself choosing Blu-Ray. The superior video/audio quality is certainly a factor but the main reason I choose Blu-Ray is often price.

For example, I recently wanted to buy Battlestar Galactica in HD. Bizarrely, you can't buy the whole series or even some of the seasons whole on the UK iTunes store. You have to purchase each episode individually for seasons 2 & 4, therefore costing £50 a season! Buying the whole series on iTunes costs around £170. When I can get it on Blu-Ray for £85, it's a no-brainer.

I'd love to buy a Mac mini with a Blu-Ray player. Of course, the best of both worlds is Blu-Rays that come with a digital copy. I wish that this was a standard feature on all Blu-Rays.

I dont get this. You already have a PS3 that is designed with Blu-ray playback for a home theater so why would you want to pay at least 50% than an entire PS3 just for a drive for a device that isnt designed for a home theater?

Because I have a wife who hates all of the wires and remotes in our main living room. If I could replace everything with one box that does everything then I would be able to live a quieter life.

So the wires are an issue, but a clumsy interface isnt? Mac OS X isnt designed for a Home Theater, the PS3 is.

Front Row didnt get anything but a simple bug fix over Leopard for SL. It was a test for AppleTV, IMO. Even if you do use it, its still clumsy for accessing the Mac as a personal computer connected to your TV.

If you want to connect a single device to your HDTV the PS3 is pretty good at this, but there are plenty of other options that allow for better control via remote and/or a 10-Foot UI. On top of that, they all cost less than the cost of a 9.5mm Ultra-Slim Slot-Loading Blu-ray option for the Mac Mini would cost.

I just dont see any argument that makes a Mac Mini with Blu-ray the best option, expect for those that simply have to have Apple products in every part of their life and I dont see that as a good argument. I mostly have Apple products, but only because they fit my usage needs best.

There are many HTPC UIs are that great and they support Blu-ray playback, and will cost you less than what you can get for selling your Mac Mini and PS3. Youll be able to by a whole lot of Blu-ray discs with the money you save -and- reduce wire clutter.

The PS3 is unbeatable for the price, there's no doubts about that.

However, as a closed box, it has its limitations. If your media collection is in Windows Media player then a PS3 is great. If your media collection is in iTunes then you're in for a world of pain. It's possible to stream music through some rather backward methods but obviously any video with DRM is impossible to stream. The overall PS3 media experience for an iTunes user is far worse than Front Row.

Then you've got to consider all of the Internet-based streaming services. The PS3 supports BBC iPlayer but there's no support for services such as Spotify. Even BBC iPlayer requires the user to navigate webpages with a controller and that's a very awkward experience.

Would a Windows or Linux-based HTPC be better? Well, if you want something that's quiet, small and not based on an Atom CPU, then it certainly won't be any cheaper.

Between an Apple wireless keyboard and the new trackpad, controlling a Mac mini from the sofa isn't in any way clumsy. It's not the best solution for everyone, but it is for some people.

I think we can both agree no one has done it right yet. I thought Google had a great plan to interact with your normal viewing without actually stepping on the toes of the networks, but the networks (at least in the US) disagree.

Agreed. I'm not sure if anyone will ever come up with a decent solution. There's just too many players who want to control the experience.

Best post in weeks!

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Batman Begins has similar problems even with players that have the latest firmware updates

The thing is Blu-ray is still relatively new and it took a while for DVD to get all the bizarre bugs worked out. Also as far as Java is concerned Apple basically said "Ok Oracle we are going to stop making our own version Java; let's see how well you do."

I think the PS3 is probably the best media player on balance out there right now, for the price anyway. (a Dell Zino HD would beat it, but it's expensive)

I'm in the UK too and the PS3's current line-up of iPlayer , LoveFilm streaming, MUBI streaming, PSN Video Store, Blu-Ray, DVD, and DNLA streaming is better than the competition and all accessible through a nice, clean, 1080p interface on a Bluetooth remote.

Admittedly the streaming services are weak at present. iPlayer is just a sub-SD flash video web based front end, MUBI has virtually no content, and LoveFilm is basically VHS quality... but maybe they'll improve someday. Blu-Ray however is a joy, the PS3's DVD upscaling is superb for those that need it, and it will happily stream H.264, MPEG 2, and WMV video over DNLA, including raw DVD VOB files. I hear other UK streaming services are coming (4 On Demand etc), and for US owners obviously they get nice HD streaming from NetFlix and Hulu. Netflix is even streaming 1080p now, a la Microsoft on the X360, which is something the Apple TV will never be able to do.

My music is in iTunes but I can easily get to it from the PS3 by setting up a DNLA server (I use TwonkyMedia) and pointing it to my iTunes library. Works fine and iTunes doesn't know a thing. As for DRM video, well the easy solution to that problem is don't buy anything with DRM on it. DRM is a disease and I avoid it at all costs when I'm paying for downloaded content.

....that Windows 7 Does NOT support Blu-Ray movie playback without additional software. Remember the days of XP when you had to download additional Codecs for DVD playback....same thing goes for Blu-Ray, the only thing Windows 7 supports out of the box is reading files off of the disk. The codecs require regular renewal as well.

lol maybe you should open your eyes past the stupid ass apple.com domain, sony even has a 13" 1080p laptop as well has TONS and TONS of 15.6", there have been dell 1920x1200 15" laptops for the last 4 years, my gaming laptop has a 1080p 15.6" screen.


are you freaking retarded? you realize itunes is a windows application too right? Pc ultraportables last LONGER than the macbookair at 8-12 hours, they can all play 1080p content off their hard drives. get a freaking clue fanboy. at least pc users have the option of watching bluray and outputing that over HDMI without stupid adapters and crap, not all macbooks can do 8ch audio over display port.


the OS supports it, every laptop i know of that has a BDROM drive comes with software for free, for example, you can download a BD player from sony, if you own a sony laptop, its on the same page as you would download drivers. OSX doesnt even support BD and the hardware costs MORE.


sorry but your piece of crap 4mbit/s 720p isnt nearly 45mbit/s 1080p quality.
and WTF are you trying to prove anyways? are you saying PC's cant watch downloaded content? what have i been doing for the last 9 years then i wonder... (actaully i think i started downloading stuff in 1998, Aqua - Barbie.mp3 being the first one haha


if people cant tell the diffrence between 720p and 1080p on a 15.6" screen, then you sure as hell cant tell the difference between the iphone 3gs screen and the iphone 4 screen.... according to that logic.

to make it easier to understand, thats 1280x720 resolution vs 1920x1080 on a 15" screen, 1 looks like absolute shit, and 1 looks beautiful.

what kind of ridiculous post is this? pull your head out of your ass.

10" netbooks can play 1080p content starting with the Asus 1005PR for $399 (almost all newer netbooks can handle 1080p even without a 1080p scren, they just output it over HDMI)
sony has a 13" laptop with a 1080p screen (this bad boy even has an i7")
lots of 15" laptops all have 1080p
FFS even this Ortustech company made an 4.8" 1080p screen

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/25/ortus...npage_engadget

here is a dell lasting 5 hours on a small battery, it can obviously play the entire bluray
http://www.dell.com/us/p/studio-1558/pd

oh look at that! its only $699, you cant even buy a piece of crap apple laptop for that price. and even if you could, it would be a 2 year old refurbed macbook with no features, not even an sd card reader.

You make a good point, solipsism, about that Apple doesn't offer it. Yes, I haven't found an app that will play the encrypted Blu-ray directly for the Mac. And Apple doesn't offer a Blu-ray burner in their Macs, I wish it were an option especially for laptops, but I can alway just copy it first (to the HD) then play later.

To answer your question, Apple's Mac "DVD player" will only playback DVDs or a DVD source folder (something with a VIDEO_TS folder) that contain .vob files.

I use VLC to playback just about any video container and codec there is. It finally hit version 1.0.0 last year after 13 years of development and is still improving as a free, open-source app. It's at version 1.1.5 as of yesterday (11/13/2010). VLC plays the M2TS files as well as the TS and M2T files (they're all the same MPEG 2 codec, usually).

It is interesting that when I play the m2ts file from the Blu-ray disc, nothing happens, the message window says garbage. But the exact same copied files on my hard drive (up to 44 GB I've seen) are the exact same size to the byte (the same 11 digits, Avatar is 44,897,476,608 bytes) and play perfectly. I don't understand the way files are encrypted, but the decrypted file is exactly the same size. There are a number of apps for the Mac and Windows to copy the Blu-ray to the hard drive decrypted, then I turn it into an MKV file with "MakeMKV". From there I can do anything with it. The MKV keeps all the languages and subtitles (which I like).

VLC will play the m2ts files from the Blu-ray disc after decryption (copied to the HD) but many Blu-ray discs will split the files to many segments, "MakeMKV" is an app that will combine all the files to a complete Title. Avatar is still the only movie that VLC couldn't play directly, and apparently lots of regular Blu-ray Players couldn't play it either!

I also noticed that all Blu-ray Discs have ".m2ts" container files, but the video codec may be MPEG-2 TS, H.264, or VC-1. Avatar has a 44,897,476,608 byte M2TS file that is actually H.264 video for it's whole main title.

I use "Handbrake" to re-encode the MKV (or .m2ts) file to a MP4 (still H.264) for Quicktime or the iPhone. I've noticed that when I encode Avatar from 44.9 GB to 8.5 GB file (fits on DVD-DL), I can't tell any difference in video quality. I would have to freeze frame on some high action scene to see it, but haven't found it yet!

Again, you're right, Apple doesn't offer Blu-ray, and I can't play a BD directly. It takes me usually less than a half hour to copy a Blu-ray disc first. I would like to see an app for Mac OS X to do it. My 27" iMac and it's attached 1080p display both support HDCP anyway, not that it's ever used after I copy the disc for my own legal playback.

your also forgetting, people's flights get delayed all the time, if your stuck for 8 hours, and you didnt plan on being stuck, you can just buy a bluray and watch it.

you apple fanboys really think you can download 4GB over airport wireless? or stream an HD movie on public internet? lol get real, most places cap your speeds so you cant even watch a low bitrate youtube video

At this very moment I have 5 movies, 63 TV shows and 1000+ songs on my iPad. There is still 13GB of capacity remaining. Running out of content and needing to buy a bluray disc is not something I'm too concerned about

your post is full of BS

$500 million is a small number to you?

the fact that windows 7 SUPPORTS bluray is what your missing, OSX DOES NOT even if there is a BD rom or BDRW drive

macs have high resolution screens? you dolt.

15" Macbook pro 1440x900
13" Sony vaio z series 1920x1080
15" Asus g53jw (the laptop i have now) 1920x1080
15" MSI GX series 1920x1080
15.4" dell D series from 3 years ago 1920x1200 (old work laptop from university)

Which has a higher res screen?

lets try this again

13" Macbook Pro or 13" Macbook air - 1366x768 | 1280x800
13" HP envy - 1600x900

Which has a higher res screen?

one more time!

11.6" Macbook air - 1366x768
8" (YES EIGHT INCHES) Sony vgn-p13gh - 1600x768

Which has a higher res screen?

Even if it were, if you had one of those Mac laptops that don't support Blu-Ray, you could just buy a DVD instead. It's not like a Mac can't play movies at all, which is what this commercial implies.

which one of those movies is 1080p at 40mbit/s?

your 64GB of worthless media space is nothing compared to the 1TB netbooks can hold, whats funny is netbooks can output that over HDMI as well where as the ipad cant do shit. i dont even think the 1GHz samsung CPU can play 1080p.

64GB ipad in canada costs damn near $900
a 1TB netbook with upgraded ram and battery to last 16 hours worth of movie time is $670
the netbook can also run windows 7 ultimate with a couple VM's and multi task just incase you need to do some work

no really, macbookair's cant play DVD's, because according to almighty jobs and his whoring mouth, optical media is dead!

there are hordes of undead zombies using optical media and its your job to destroy them! JOBS COMMANDS THIS!

Unfortunately none of the movies on my iPad are 1080p at 40mbps and my iPad can't output over HDMI. This will be very inconvenient the next time I'm on an airplane that has a 60" TV in front of my seat.

So now we'are talking about MacBook Airs? In exactly what way is the laptop in the ad comparable to a MacBook Air?

Or are you moving the goalposts in order to obfuscate the fact that unlike what this ad is trying to imply, a traveler with a MacBook or a MacBook Pro can buy a physical disc to play during a flight just as easy as a traveler with a Windows laptop can.

From the ad:

"Avatar. Own it on Blu-ray and DVD."

Gosh, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but in the world of technology, standards change. Rather quickly. It's not up to you, or me, or Steve. It just happens. The way forward is littered with the debris of standards that most people couldn't see how they could live without.

Better to get used to it.

Why do you find it strange? If they included one by default then every copy of Windows 7 would be more expensive to cover the playback licencing, this way only people wanting Blu-ray playback pay for it.

Atleast all MY macs have dvi or equivalent output.... That the hell are you talking about....

We're talking about watching movies on a plane, which is apparently not what you're talking about.

lol which one of your DVI's can output 7.1 audio?
only until recently were the displayports found in macbook able to output both audio and video with HDCP compliance.

this is straight off apple's website

it will die when something better comes out, same with floppy drives,

floppy disks were used right up until usb flash drives came out, flash drives were larger capacity, faster and more compact, better in every single way (except price but that also changed)

currently downloaded content is not nearly as high quality as BD's, until all of our internet connections are faster and we have close to PB's of space as storage, i dont see BD's going anywhere


if im spending $20 on a movie, why the hell would i buy DVD? seriously, do any of you people care about quality?

why not buy mp3s encoded 64kbps instead of 320kbps? they are going to sound the same right becuase they are the same song?

thats funny, jobs says netbooks are slow, have cramped keyboards, and clunky pc software

well what is the ipad?
too slow to play quality videos in any format, the samsung 1ghz cpu is ment for phones

cramped keyboards? its more cramped to type on a 9.7" screen while stealing half screen realestate

clunky pc software, last time i checked 64bit photoshop ran faster on PC's than it did on OSX,

the eeepc 1015PN being $399 and eeepc 1215N being the same price as the ipad doesnt have a 1080p screen, however it can still play 1080p content and output that over HDMI if you ever need it too (maybe once you arrive at your hotel there is a wall mounted tv there)

EDIT: does anyone see the ad at the bottom of the page? lol its advertising a vaio,

What's really weird is that no one has made an easy to use Blu-Ray player for OS X. Given that PowerDVD, etc can do so on Windows that's just a little odd if there really is pent up demand for Blu-Ray on OS X.

You can buy Blu-Ray drives for Macs if you want so it's not like the player wouldn't have some kind of market.

Really? They haven't? Because I've been using VLC and MakeMKV to play Blu-Ray on my Mac in OS X for a while now.

Jeez, people. Read posts.

Are you talking about putting an AACS protected Blu-ray disc in your Mac and playing back without illegally bypassing AACS or ripping to the drive?

I wouldn't say that MakeMKV is illegal, no. VLC is using the location defined by MakeMKV to play the files off the disk.

I stopped using floppy disks LONG before USB flash drives came out. I'm surprised that you used them for so long. It was easier to e-mail files than use floppies. What did you use them for?



Well, in my house, I am done with purchasing devices that play back physical media. I still have a few DVD players, but as they die (or perhaps even before) I'll be replacing them with streaming gear (such as AppleTV, but not necessarily so). In the meantime, some of my old (and very small) TVs still have DVD players attached to them. When my daughters want the new Barbie movie, I buy them on DVD, because that's what kind of player I have attached to their old TVs. It would make no sense to purchase a Blu-ray player for these TVs.

As far as quality is concerned... current streaming quality is inferior to Blu-ray, but I prefer the convenience by a long shot. And between the two methods, streaming has a better chance in the long run of improving quality than Blu-ray has of improving convenience. In other words, we know where this is ultimately headed (i.e. streaming wins eventually) and the current status is good enough for me (i.e. in favor of streaming).

Thompson