Watching a Blu-Ray movie on Mac OS X

So as it turns out, contrary to popular opinion, it is actually possible to watch a Blu-Ray movie on Mac OS X. All you need is a Mac equipped with a Blu-Ray drive (Other World Computing can help you with that), and two programs: MakeMKV and VLC. The process isn't entirely straightforward, so I've put together a guide on Flickr to show the way:

The first step in the Blu-Ray watching process

Now, given that I actually have a fairly decent Blu-Ray player (Sony PlayStation 3), why would I want to go through this convoluted process just to watch a HD movie on my Mac? Let's break it down:

Pros:

• Once I choose the right stream, I can jump right into the movie. No stupid previews that you can't skip, no FBI warnings, etc. That is a great experience.
• Multitasking — if the movie is boring, I can hop out and check mail, the web, etc.
• Long pause — if I want to take a break, I can pause the movie, put my Mac to sleep, and resume watching later. To the best of my knowledge, the PS3 lacks this ability.
• Better privacy — the PS3 is quite annoying if you don't enable BD-Live, the feature that lets Blu-Ray movies talk to the Internet (and hence lets movie studios know what you are watching).

But, that's not to say that this system is perfect...

Cons:

• Because VLC is reading a network stream, it doesn't show any time information. For me, the lack of "time remaining", in particular, really hurts.
• Again, because VLC is reading a network stream, all chapter markers are gone. You can fast forward, but that's it.
• Skipping ahead (by clicking on VLC's scrubber) does work, but is painfully slow. And without any time information, it's pretty hard to guess where you're actually going to end up in the movie.
• There are probably Blu-Ray discs that aren't compatible with MakeMKV.

For now, I'm glad to have this ability (having to rip the entire disc to my hard drive was getting old), and while I'd be much happier with native Blu-Ray support on Mac OS X, I'm quite impressed what the hacker and open source communities have been able to pull off.

-Andy.