So you have a mac and you have a Blu-Ray drive. But you can’t figure out how to get them to work with each other. Well unfortunately for us sad folks Apple has not been very supportive of the Blu-Ray platform for what ever reason. Fortunately for us though we have people out there in the open source and hacking community that are really smart and have made it possible. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as inserting your disc and pressing play. But it can be done and it isn’t all that hard.

You will need two pieces of software in order to make this work. MakeMKV and Plex (I personally prefer Plex over XBMC. But they should both work nicely).

The first application you will have to use is MakeMKV. It is rather straight forward. First you need to set up the infomation it needs to decrypt a Blu-Ray drive. Go to you preferences and click on the BD+ tab. You will see two areas. One asking for a SVQ file and another asking for a location to save your BD+ debug dumps.

The SVQ file is a special file you have to download from MakeMKV that has all the special codes to decrypt your disc. If by chance they don’t have the code for your disc yet. You can email your BD+ dump file to svq@makemkv.com and with in a few days you can download the SVQ and rip your disc.

After you have all that setup you can open your disc in MakeMKV and it’ll scan the structure of the disc and allow you to export different video, audio and subtitle tracks to an MKV you can play in plex. The only bad part to this solution is you have to rip it to your hard drive. It would be nice if you could just play it from the disc saving time and space.

I prefer to play it in plex because it seems the playback is a lot smoother than VLC and MPlayer. Although I haven’t tested the new builds of MPlayer lately.

let me know if you run into any problems trying to get this to work. Like I said before this works great when you want to watch a show on your mac in 1080p.