Ever wondered about using Blu-Ray on macOS? Yeah, me too. So, I stumbled upon this oddball Blu-Ray drive that's trying to be everything at once - DVD writer, USB hub, Card Reader. Figured it'd be interesting to see how it fares, especially since Apple and Microsoft aren't too keen on supporting Blu-Ray movie playback directly. Let's dive into what turned out to be quite the journey.

0:00 Intro
1:08 Blu-Ray is convoluted
2:19 Supported codecs
2:51 Umbrella format
4:07 macOS and understanding Blu Ray movies
5:01 Tutorial: How to play Blu-Ray movies in macOS
7:45 Travel Break
8:34 Weird Blu Ray Drive
10:28 USB 3.0 is a lie
11:03 Testing out media formats
12:12 Benchmarking USB 3.0
13:04 Dumb Experiments
14:27 A word about cheap Blu Ray drives
15:52 The Oregon Trail

What's in This Video?
The Weirdballs Device: A Blu-Ray drive that's also a DVD-RW, USB hub, and SD card reader, all for $56. 
Road Trip: Decided to test this thing out while hitting spots on the Oregon Trail. 
Mac Playback Tutorial: Getting Blu-Ray movies to run on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, and yes, it's a bit of a process.
The World of Codecs: Quick chat about why Blu-Ray offers better picture quality.
Blu-Ray Explained: Breaking down the different types of Blu-Ray discs out there.
Testing Time: Throwing everything but the kitchen sink at this drive, including PS3 games and a PowerMac G4, because why not?


Fun fact: The export of this video to ProRes 422 was 40 GB, and uploaded it directly to YouTube.


Links

Tutorial:
https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2024/02/19/how-to-play-blu-rays-on-mac-vlc.html

Sources:
https://aacsla.com/what-is-aacs/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System
https://medium.com/@simonconnah/how-to-play-blu-ray-discs-on-macos-with-vlc-3de7a4f2fa61