[mackandproud]

I have a blackbook from 2008 2.4 ghz.

How can I watch blu ray discs on my computer?

What external drives are available and will work effectively with my 'book and 10.6?

[ibook_steve]

As far as I know, you can't.

Steve

[Lateralus]

It's not as simple as buying an external and installing Windows to use it, either. Because AFAIK, your machine needs to be HDCP compliant for any Blu-ray playback, and I'm fairly sure that the pre-unibody MacBooks don't fall into that category.

[Eug]

Originally Posted by Lateralus 

It's not as simple as buying an external and installing Windows to use it, either. Because AFAIK, your machine needs to be HDCP compliant for any Blu-ray playback, and I'm fairly sure that the pre-unibody MacBooks don't fall into that category.

You sure?

Anyways, a way around it would be to use VGA to an external monitor. If that's an option, then any external USB 2 Blu-ray drive should be fine. I bought an external slot-load portable USB DVD+/-RW burner with BD-ROM support, and it works fine for Blu-ray playback on my Windows machines. The main problem with it is that it takes 2 USB ports, because of the power requirements.



Doesn't this 2.4 GHz blackbook have an Intel X3100? If so, that won't help accelerate Blu-ray, but then again the 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo alone should be enough.

[Waragainstsleep]

VGA is not going to be HDCP compliant either. You are more likely to be able to watch it on the internal display than on any external.
You can watch Blu-Ray on Wintel laptops as far as I know and they use the same screens and in many cases the same GPUs. It should work that way but you aren't going to get video output from HDCP protected content. Better off ripping it to mp4 and streaming to an AppleTV.

[Eug]

VGA does not require HDCP compliance.

Pretty big loophole and it's one way to completely get around the HDCP issue.

In fact, AFAIK VGA can't be HDCP compliant because it is an analogue tech that also precedes HDCP. Yet, VGA fully supports full 1080p playback.

---

To expand on this:

Check out this white paper on analogue sunset.

To put it in simpler terms... If you are using VGA from any product that was sold in 2010 or earlier, you can legally get full 1080p output via VGA for Blu-ray playback.

This will change with hardware/software created in 2011 or later. For analogue outputs, you'll still get Blu-ray playback, but at lower resolution . And in 2014 or later, analogue output can be disabled.

HDCP doesn't apply here, because VGA doesn't understand HDCP anyway.

Hopefully by 2014 he'll have updated his laptop.

[P]

No loophole - different HDCP protections. The software Bluray player requires the OS to guarantee that the rest of the computer is cryptographically signed as HDCP compliant. This mainly means that the GPU and its driver must support it. If the they do not, nothing will play - you'll get a black screen. If the GPU and the driver are fine, the next step is the display. For the GPU to output anything over a digital port (DVI, HDMI or DP), the display must also provide an HDCP signature. If there is a non-compliant display connected to a digital port, you again get no picture.

If you do have a compliant graphics card and driver etc but use an analog port like VGA, the software player is informed of this. If the file has the ICT flag set, the output will be downsampled to half its original resolution and sent to the graphics card. If the ICT flag is not set - and I believe that the MPAA has promised that it won't be set on any movies produced by its member companies until a date in late 2011 sometime.

The rationale for all of this is simple: the MPAA thought that AACS would be so unbreakable that the only way to copy a movie would be to capture the digital bitstream after decoding and decompression. By encoding the bitstream, they hoped to prevent capturing of the digital stream. The analog stream was less of an issue, as there would always be some degradation from D/A-A/D transformations (OK so there'd be minor degradation from recompressing the digital stream, but the bitrate is high enough that this would be negligible), but it was still slightly worrying. They basically thought that we'd all copy Bluray to VHS cassettes, and added the ICT to stop that. After a massive outcry, ICT was made optional and a 5 year voluntary ban instituted.

Today, AACS is broken, BD+ gets broken fairly soon after each updated, HDCP is not only broken but the master key has leaked, and Bluray is not quite the success the studios expected. It is not at all certain that ICT will ever be activated. We'll see in a year or so, I guess.

[Spheric Harlot]

I can't help it - reading that, I find that Steve Jobs characterizing Blu-Ray as "a world of hurt" was a rather diplomatic understatement.

You can walk out of a store with a Blu-Ray capable computer, and chances are, it won't actually work with the displays you already have, or, if it does, the image might not actually be any better than the DVDs you can snap up for one-third the price, and even that *might* stop working entirely sometime in the future, at the manufacturers' whim.

Is that an accurate summary from the average consumers' perspective?

[The Godfather]

Use Makemkv, VLC and this script. Several Mac users are happy with it.

www.makemkv.com • View topic - Easy Blu-ray movie playback!

[Eug]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

I can't help it - reading that, I find that Steve Jobs characterizing Blu-Ray as "a world of hurt" was a rather diplomatic understatement.

You can walk out of a store with a Blu-Ray capable computer, and chances are, it won't actually work with the displays you already have, or, if it does, the image might not actually be any better than the DVDs you can snap up for one-third the price, and even that *might* stop working entirely sometime in the future, at the manufacturers' whim.

Is that an accurate summary from the average consumers' perspective?

No, that is not an accurate summary at all IMO. HDCP support is the norm now, including on all Macs, so from that perspective there's no reason for Apple to restrict Blu-ray playback.

There are other technical and marketing reasons not to support Blu-ray, but actual hardware support is not among them. Macs have supported this in hardware for years, as have 3rd party monitors.

You price argument doesn't make sense either. New big name BD releases in Canada for example are often say $30 CAD. The corresponding DVD will be $25.

I don't usually buy $30 BDs unless it's an absolute must have the first day it's released (like District 9). I generally wait until I can get it for $19.99 or less. At that point, the corresponding DVD will be $15.99.

Yeah, there are $5.99 DVDs out there, but the corresponding BD will be $9.99.

As for the image constraint token, AFAIK no commercial BD has ever been released with the token flagged on. As P said, it's not been implemented. Going forward it may be, and I agree that's stupid, but so far it hasn't been an issue.

Finally, you can't implement ICT on a disc after the fact. Once the disc is printed without ICT, it will never have ICT. The only way for it to gain ICT is for them to print a new disc, and you actually go out and buy it.

[P]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

I can't help it - reading that, I find that Steve Jobs characterizing Blu-Ray as "a world of hurt" was a rather diplomatic understatement.

You can walk out of a store with a Blu-Ray capable computer, and chances are, it won't actually work with the displays you already have, or, if it does, the image might not actually be any better than the DVDs you can snap up for one-third the price, and even that *might* stop working entirely sometime in the future, at the manufacturers' whim.

Is that an accurate summary from the average consumers' perspective?

Almost. If you walk out of the store with a computer without a display, it might or might not work with your display at home. Even if it works today, the quality of future movies might degrade in a year but they won't stop working.

[P]

Originally Posted by Eug 

No, that is not an accurate summary at all IMO. HDCP support is the norm now, including on all Macs, so from that perspective there's no reason for Apple to restrict Blu-ray playback.

That's a weasely way to word it. Apple isn't restricting Blu-ray playback - they're just not working on implementing it. The reasons I quoted above are not even the best reason for that (that would be the Protected Video Path garbage).

Originally Posted by Eug 

There are other technical and marketing reasons not to support Blu-ray, but actual hardware support is not among them. Macs have supported this in hardware for years, as have 3rd party monitors.

The MBP has supported it from late 2008. The rest I don't know, to be honest. Do you have any stats on the percentage of monitors that support HDCP now? I don't. I just know that DVI existed for close to a decade before the first DVI HDCP monitor was on the market.

[Eug]

Originally Posted by P 

That's a weasely way to word it. Apple isn't restricting Blu-ray playback - they're just not working on implementing it. The reasons I quoted above are not even the best reason for that (that would be the Protected Video Path garbage).

That's just semantics.

However, personally I think Steve is just being stubborn. He has his reasons, but as I said, hardware support is not one of them.

The MBP has supported it from late 2008. The rest I don't know, to be honest. Do you have any stats on the percentage of monitors that support HDCP now? I don't. I just know that DVI existed for close to a decade before the first DVI HDCP monitor was on the market.

Stats? No. However, I haven't seen a single DVI/HDMI monitor in two years that I have been remotely interested in that didn't support HDCP. That wasn't true 4 years ago, but is true now.

In general, if it doesn't support HDCP, that's because it's a VGA-only monitor, or else maybe it's some sort of el-cheapo off-brand monitor that nobody's ever heard of. But actually even the off-brand ones I've looked at support HDCP too now.

[P]

I don't think Steve is stubborn now. I think he was in in his twenties, and that that reputation is still around, but it's not fair to say that he is so now. He did kill his favourite Mac, the Cube, and he did backtrack on the iMac designs. It's not all that common, but Apple does admit to being wrong on occasion (and God knows so many companies don't). Sales numbers matter - if the MBP didn't sell because everyone wanted Bluray, Apple would bite the bullet and add it. It seems to be doing OK.

Stats? No. However, I haven't seen a single DVI/HDMI monitor in two years that I have been remotely interested in that didn't support HDCP. That wasn't true 4 years ago, but is true now.

I know - if only because most cheap monitors are VGA only - but that still means that the vast majority of all DVI-capable monitors ever made will not work when playing Bluray, for a very silly reason that has only become sillier with time. There are your stubborn people - the studios, who keep insisting on a protection feature that is inconvenient and obsoletes lots of perfectly good equipment, never prevented a single illegal copy and is so utterly broken that even its inventor and main sponsor has admitted it.

I own a Bluray player, my TV supports HDCP, and I watch Bluray on occasion, but I'm delighted that Apple refuses to budge here. The MAFIAA need to see that they can't get away with shoving things down everyone's throat every single time.

[olePigeon]

You can't watch Blu-Ray movies on your MacBook because the MPAA has already decided that you're a criminal.

[Lateralus]

Originally Posted by olePigeon 

You can't watch Blu-Ray movies on your MacBook because the MPAA has already decided that you're a criminal.

And there you have it... All this thread is, or will become, in a nutshell.

[Eug]

Well Apple is one of the worst offenders for arbitrarily obsoleting perfectly usable equipment, so it's not as if Jobs is the poster boy of consumer protection. Furthermore, Jobs has gone on record to say he wants movies locked down hard. This is in stark contrast to his stance on music, but that's not surprising since he has no personal stake in music. He made those statements when he was CEO of Pixar.

[ibook_steve]

After all this, I think my answer still stands!

Steve