Digital Lifestyle > All Reviews > Software > Multimedia > DVD playback > Mac Blu-ray Player review

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 Mac Blu-ray Player review

Turn your Mac into a Blu-ray playing media centre

Andrew Harrison | PC Advisor

Manufacturer: Macgo
Manufacturer: Macgo
Pros: Only Blu-ray player for Mac; great image quality; plays wide range of formats
Cons: Very basic interface; some glitches
Min specs: Intel Mac BD-ROM drive 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better OS X 10.5 internet connection to update DRM keys
Price: $49.95 (about £32)
We rate this 3 out of 5.Star rating:

Macs have never supported Blu-ray, but now you can thanks to Macgo’s Mac Blu-ray Player. The software relies on the CPU to decode video and audio, so you’ll need a recent Mac. The core functionality of the media player has been extracted from VideoLAN Client (VLC), and as it’s based on that Swiss Army knife of video players, Mac Blu-ray Player will also play all manner of video from your hard disk or network.

Instead of being greeted by a fancy menu screen when you load a Blu-ray disc, you’re presented with a simple text-based interface. The program selects the first title, usually the main film feature; searching on a chapter basis can be a tortuous task. Also tricky is finding the remaining disc content.

In windowed mode, a silver tray below the video picture gives basic playback controls. There’s play/pause, stop, and a pair of buttons for track skip. Sometimes the track skip buttons failed to work after a few presses. There are no slow motion or frame-advance controls.

Selecting audio tracks is a case of suck-it-and-see. There may be several audio tracks included with a Blu-ray film and then there may be commentary, or audio description tracks to fathom out. None of the metadata about video or audio tracks is available to see, unlike VLC, which can sometimes display this.

No fancy Blu-ray disc menu screens – just one still from the film and a few text options are offered in the Navigation Panel

App stability needs improving; it sometimes quit unexpectedly or locked up. However, when playing an HD movie, there’s no escaping the great quality of the picture. In our tests, lip-synch was always correct and there were no visual artefacts from the video stream. The impressive image quality can almost make you forget the app’s idiosyncrasies, and we hope that usability will improve with time.

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