bcj

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I mostly watch movies with a mac mini hooked up to my TV. When I want to watch a blu-ray I own I've switched over to my PS4 that I only really use for this purpose. Recently, the battery in my PS4 controller died so I can only use it while the controller is plugged in. It already has been annoying to switch inputs. I know VLC needs some additional plug-ins to play blu-rays but I don't have a good feeling for how much of a pain this actually is to get set up and working. Am I going to be miserable if I buy an external blu-ray drive? Should I just buy an inexpensive blu-ray player or fix my controller


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in reply to @bcj's post:

you'll miss out on menus but getting a drive like the BU40N can let you rip it with some tools, i..e, makemkv. may require a firmware mod on the drive to work. this is something that is nicer if you have some kind of media hosting solution (plex, emby, jellyfin, etc.). makemkv's forums has a section with information on all of this you may want to look into if it's something you're motivated to engage with in the future. You'll probably want to start here: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19634

(I see someone else also mentioned most of what I said, but yeah, there's some very odd specific requirements to play UHD/4K discs, including CPU features that are outmoded. If you got a very specific system you might be able to play them like any other disc, but since I have a jellyfin setup already I actually find that ripping a 4K disc is the more convenient option long-term)

My follow-up question if I went with a drive was going to be how's blu-ray ripping software nowadays so that's good to know. I was planning on ripping at least some of my collection if I easily could but I want to be able to just throw a disc in

From experience you can read Blu-Ray disks on macOS with VLC (and MakeMKV) BUT it's annoying because modern macOS doesn't like apps (MakeMKV) patching other apps (like VLC to add the decryption stuff) so it gets tricky super quickly. You're better off just ripping them (if you're fine missing the menus1) with MakeMKV and then maybe converting them to a smaller format with Handbrake/other_video_transcoding.


  1. keeping the menus when playing whole Blu-Ray rips is possible but because most Blu-Ray menus are Java-based you need to somehow have the right exact Java version installed and I could not figure out for the life of me how to make that work on VLC on modern macOS (M1 and such). I had better success on my Windows PC but even then it required me to set random environment variables to point to the exact right Java runtime: not worth the time IME.