Blu-Ray on the Mac Still a Bag of Hurt
7-Jan, 2010
My good friend (I’ll call him “Andy”) is slowly being convinced by yours truly and others that the Mac mini makes a great HTPC. But, as Andy points out:
I hear you, my friend and you are not alone. Blu-Ray playback on the Mac is quite the debacle and should you decide to connect an external Blu-Ray drive to your beloved Apple machine, results may vary. It is my understanding that Blu-Ray support is currently nonexistent on the Mac…even with the coveted, video software savior, VideoLAN (VLC). It’s also not encouraging that the hardworking, VLC crew is in desparate need of Mac developers. One [lame] solution offered in the Apple Discussion forums is to run Windows 7 via Boot Camp and play the Blu-Ray disc with an external USB, Blu-Ray drive, assuming all of the drivers are recognized…sad.
There may not be a single reason as to why Blu-Ray is currently not supported on the Mac. Steve Jobs, who sits on the Disney (Pixar) Board of Directors, has been quoted as saying that Blu-Ray [licensing] is “a bag of hurt.” Moreover, Jobs has always pushed streaming video, as it forces people to drink the “iTunes Store fruit juice.” People are also likely waiting for more Blu-Ray titles to appear and player costs to drop before they upgrade their entire collection of “vanilla” DVDs to the newer, Blu-Ray format. So, it’s not surprising that box office sales outpace disc sales in 2009. Like I really need to buy Howard the Duck again. Lea Thompson is pretty easy on the eyes, though.
Personally, many movies just plain suck, so I’m certainly not going to shell out $13+ to see it in a theater where the men’s bathroom smells like the basement of an all-night kegger at the “I-Phelta-Thi” fraternity house and the management refuses to let me enter because I walked in with a Nalgene bottle full of water. Eff them. Eff them right in the ear, I say!
So, to my friend Andy…if you really want a Mac mini/Blu-Ray experience, wait until Apple gets their business together before you make the purchase. Maybe Apple will have something up its sleeve (other than the rumored tablet) at the 27-Jan, 2010 announcement. Word of warning, though, you may be waiting for a long, long time.
Warner Bros. Hates Computers
14-Apr, 2009
From the WTF?-files comes a tale of a man who purchased The Dark Knight on DVD and couldn’t play the movie. Sad, I know. Since he now owned the DVD, he wanted to rip the movie to a digital format that he could conveniently play on his iPhone. This can easily be done with excellent software, like HandBrake, but it seems Warner Bros. dislikes computers and encoded the disc with a DRM technology that prohibits playing the movie on a computer. You read it right, the young man couldn’t even play the movie on 4 computers (2 Macs and 2 PCs). Do you smell that? This reeks of rotting, WTF?
Oh yeah, the young man is actually me. I wouldn’t care so much if I couldn’t rip it, but watching the movie would be nice. I do not own a stand-alone DVD/Blue-ray player and I am not alone. So, thinking something was wrong, I took the movie back and exchanged it for another disc. Filth, foul, filth! Once again, the movie was unable to play on all 4 computers. As always, I was determined to find a solution…SO I COULD WATCH THE GD MOVIE! Intolerable.
Sticking the DVD into my Mac, opening HandBrake, and letting it do it’s thang did not work. The HandBrake log listed a few errors and the disc just spun and spun…oh, because Warner Bros. purposefully added effed-up sectors to the disc so a computer can’t play it. After searching for a bit on the World Wide Tubes, I came across a solution with HandBrake! Hurray!
- Put the GD movie into your Mac and start up HandBrake.
- Go to File → Open Source (Title Specific)… and enter “1” into the title field.
- Select your favorite preset from the sidebar and bammo, iPhone-friendly Dark Knight!
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Warner Brothers! Do they really want people to not watch the movies they release? Ignorant, ignorant sons of motherless goats!
