Review of some of the most powerful Mac Blu-ray player software

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It’s always been a problem for a Blu-ray fan to choose the best Mac Blu-ray Player so that the truly cinematic and immersive experience of Blu-ray discs can be delivered without any loss. Why players matter a lot is that Blu-ray is a patented technology and players with less features and without Blu-ray playback license cannot support this format. To help you easily enjoy Blu-ray movies on Mac anywhere, I've summarized 4 of the most powerful Mac Blu-ray Players that seem powerful and practical by comparison, and hope you can get one that can fit your needs the best. According to my test results, you can see the differences and solve Blu-ray problems more freely and convenient. Just hold on reading.

 
The first app I tested on my iMac is Macgo Mac Blu-ray Player, which is known as the first Blu-ray player software for Mac OS X. I chose TAKEN 3 as the first disc because it was produced this year. After I launched the app, it prompts a registration window, I clicked “Cancel” and saw the interface. It’s really simple, only two buttons, “Open File” and “Open Disc”, so I inserted the disc into the Blu-ray drive and clicked on “Open Disc”. It loaded pretty fast and could recognize the disc automatically. Then there appears a menu, I directly chose Play Movie. It worked pretty well, and movies looked great on my Apple Monitor. I didn’t saw any dropped frames, stuttered or froze images. The free trial version has no time limitation, but it does have watermarks when you play the Blu-ray movie. The watermark will disappear once you bought it for $39.95, down $10 from its usual retail price. Then I tried 2 other discs, UNBROKEN and FURY. They all worked pretty well.

 
I also took a look at the DVDFab Media Player for Mac Pro version. Its free version cannot play Blu-ray, and the Pro version has 30 days trial limitation. At first I took a while to find where to start the disc, then I noticed that I have to drag the disc from my desktop to the interface and drop it to a certain area, which says “Drop Media Here”. Then I did it, but it took me about 5minutes to watch it load, and I finally found out that this player cannot play TAKEN 3. Then I tried UNBROKEN, of which only the first 10 seconds can be played, then it got stuck, and I cannot even quit the program. It gave a better playback of the last disc FURY, at first it shows the “Buffering...” notification several times, after that the movie was played smoothly. It costs $39.9, about the same price as Macgo’s.
 

My next stop is Aiseesoft Mac Blu-ray Player. Its interface is as simple as Macgo’s, only two buttons, “Open File” and “Open Disc”. TAKEN 3 got stuck at 00:03:28. UNBROKEN was smooth at first, but when I tried to preview the movie so I clicked on the timeline of Control Panel, it suddenly froze. Wherever I clicked, it just stuck there and after tried several times, I finally quit the app. The same thing almost happened when I played FURY, but it didn’t freeze, just got stuck a little bit and the image was blurred a few times. FYI, this player costs $28.00, cheaper than the previous two apps, but I gotta say it’s overpriced for its quality.

 
The fourth app I reviewed is Leawo Blu-ray Player for Mac. After I installed this app and double-clicked its icon, it gave me a notification that says “Leawo Blu-ray Player cannot be opened. This application requires the legacy Java SE 6 runtime which is unavailable for this version of OS X.” So I followed its instruction and installed Java. Then I finally got this player started. The disc can be automatically recognized and showed with a small image of the movie besides the button “Open File”. I clicked on the small image of TAKEN 3, and then it told me to choose whether to use a virtual remote or the mouse to control the playback, I chose mouse control. After about 5 minutes, the disc was still loading so I ejected it and inserted UNBROKEN. It only played the beginning of the movie and then got stuck. FURY was loaded only for one minute, afterwards, the playback was smooth. This player is free right now.

All the apps require an internet connection to grab the decryption keys when you first put in a new disc. Judging by the playback performance, only Macgo can play these three discs successfully, DVDFab and Leawo can only play FURY, Aiseesoft failed to play all of them. Judging by the price, Macgo is the most expensive one, then comes DVDFab, Aiseesoft, Leawo & VLC, the last two are for free. From what I’m seeing, although Macgo is the priciest Mac Blu-ray Player, it does deliver much better Blu-ray playback experience than the other three. And it always keeps update, lately it solved some external subtitle problem and became the only one that support external subtitles compared to other four products. Like VLC, it also has its unique hardware acceleration to save CPU usage during the movie playback. If you want to play Blu-ray on your Mac and really want it to be stable and smooth, you can try Macgo Mac Blu-ray Player sometime. But if you wanna choose a freeware, you can try VLC, which has no Blu-ray playback. However, it can play unencrypted Blu-ray videos if you have some technical knowledge to access this feature. Besides, none of these five Mac Blu-ray Player can perfectly support Blu-ray Menu, hope they can make this feature better soon.

[Editor's Note:
Prices correct at date of publication - July 2015
The Author has yet to declare if they have an interest in any of the products described]

 
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