App To Watch Dvd On Mac
Part I. How to Play DVD on MacBook Pro/Air, iMac without Hard Drive
The removal of optical drive from Mac computers doesn't mean that there is no longer a way to watch DVDs on MacBook Air/Pro with Retina Display, iMac, Mac mini without hard drive. Instead, there are a few ways that will allow you to do this easily.
Then you can watch the DVD with a Mac DVD player as normal. Way 2: Rip DVDs to MP4, MOV, M4V etc. Taking an external disc drive, or the cumbersome DVD discs will increase the burden when you are in travel or on the fly. So there is another more convenient option for you: rip the DVDs and play movies on Mac computers on the go. I tested the app on both a late 2011 Mac mini (2.7GHz Intel Core i7 with 16GB of RAM) and an early 2013 MacBook Pro (2.5GHz Intel Core i5 with 8GB of RAM), using my Plextor PX-B120U 4X Blu-ray.
I. Get an external hard drive
The most direct solution to Mac without hard drive is to give it one. That's the idea of external hard drives for Mac. There are plenty of options you can choose from. For example, Apple offers USB SuperDrive at $80 to let users install software on Mac and also burn & play DVD on MacBook Air/Pro with Retina Display, iMac, Mac mini other computers without hard drive. But Apple's option doesn't contain Blu-Ray support, but you will have many other choices on Amazon.
With an external drive plugged into Mac, users can insert the DVD and play DVDs on drive-free Mac computers as usual via a USB cable.
Note: this method needs you to take the movie discs and drive whenever and wherever you want to watch DVD on MacBook Pro/Air, iMac or Mac mini computers.
II. Rip DVDs to Mac computers
Watching DVDs on MacBook Pro/Air, iMac etc via external drive is easy, but not the ideal solution in many cases. For example, you won't want to lug around the movie discs and the drive only to watch a couple of titles during the layovers on a trip. The better way is to rip DVD t to hard drive in digital formats.
There are also dozens of paid and free programs to do this like Handbrake and MakeMKV. The better choice is MacX DVD Ripper Mac Free Edition. This free DVD ripper for Mac will convert DVD to MP4, H264, MPEG4, MOV, iTunes, etc for easily playback on Mac QuickTime player. More importantly, compared with other freeware, it has the ability to support different type of DVDs with encryptions.
Bonus benefit: By ripping DVD into digital formats, you can get rid of the discs and external drives. More than that, as the DVD drive only play DVDs with the same region code, but via the ripping, you can feel free to play DVD on MacBook Pro/Air, iMac regardless of any region code.
Step 1:Free download the free DVD ripper on Mac (32/64-bit macOS Sierra and earlier supported).
Step 2: Insert the DVD disc and select an output format. Also, to rip DVD to MP4 is suggested as MP4 is the most widely used if you don't know which to choose.
Step 3: Click Run and start ripping. After a while, you can get the movie file and play it on any Mac computers without hard drive.
Note: this method needs another computer with hard drive or an external hard drive to do the ripping in advance.
III. Use Disc sharing
If you have two computers at hand, and one of which has hard drive, you can watch and play DVD on MacBook Air/Pro, iMac via disc sharing. The function allows Macs without disc drive to play DVDs by accessing another Mac's DVD drive. Check below on how to play DVD on MacBook Pro/Air, iMac, Mac mini this way.
Mac Apps Download
Step 1: Enable Disc Sharing on the Mac with Disc drive
1. On the Mac with a disc drive, open System Preference and click Sharing;
2. Click the Sharing icon and check the box for DVD or CD Sharing;
3. Insert the DVD you'd like to watch into the drive.
Step 2: Watch the shared DVD
1. Now on the Mac without hard drive, open a Finder window;
2. Select Remote Disc and double-click the computer that has the DVD sharing enabled.
3. Now you will see the shared DVD and start to watch DVD on MacBook Pro/Air, iMac, Mac mini without a hard drive.
Note: this method requires two computers running at the same time when you watch DVD movies on MacBook Pro or Air, iMac or Mac mini. Besides, internet is also required to share the DVD movies.
Since the late '90s, Macs have welcomed DVD movies. Pop a disc in your drive, watch Apple's DVD Player app open, and enjoy the show. Simple. But DVDs' high-definition successors, Blu-rays, never got the same warm reception. Today, the right third-party hardware and software will let you play Blu-ray discs on your Mac. But, uh … maybe you shouldn't?
Tell us how you really feel, Steve
Steve Jobs famously hated the licensing hurdles and hefty fees Blu-ray imposed. With his characteristic taciturn restraint, he publicly called the format a 'bag of hurt' and likened the groups behind it to the Mafia. Apple never built Blu-ray drives into Macs, and eventually ditched optical drives altogether to focus on selling movies through iTunes.
But some Mac users still need to burn their own Blu-rays or read data off BD discs, so there are plenty of third-party Blu-ray drives available for the Mac. And once those drives became available, a few enterprising companies who did (presumably) pay up for the keys to decrypt Blu-ray discs released Mac apps to play regular Blu-ray movies with those drives.
Unfortunately, searching for mac Blu-ray player online gets you a lot of highly suspect sites with creatively translated English, each pitching their own totally not-at-all-questionable video player that may or may not actually play Blu-ray discs. But there are a few options respectable enough to make it into the Mac App Store. We'll discuss those in a moment, but first, let's talk about another app that sounds like a good idea, but really isn't.
Blu-rays on VLC
VLC is a justly beloved open-source video player — free, robust, and able to play tons of different formats. With the right tinkering, Blu-ray can be one of them. But playing Blu-rays on VLC is like free-climbing a skyscraper without safety equipment: Sure, it's technically possible, but it's also incredibly difficult, full of drawbacks, and almost certainly a bad idea.
For starters, the site I originally used to find the right files that would supposedly enable Blu-ray playback on VLC is, as of this writing, no longer capable of establishing secure connections. (Which is why I'm not linking to it here.)
When it was up and running, its sparse instructions didn't seem to work, and I had to go digging for another site's advice to get VLC playing even sort of nice with Blu-ray. Then I had to separately install Java to have any hope of getting Blu-ray interactive menus working.
Even after all that, VLC wouldn't play most discs I tried with it, ominously warning me of revoked certificates and other things that sound like they involve well-paid lawyers. And when it did play discs, it refused to let me skip past the annoying preview video tracks before the movie; sometimes, trying to do so just dumped me back at the beginning of them.
VLC works great for lots of things. Blu-ray playback isn't one of them. Just don't do it. Especially when you've got another free and far more legitimate option waiting for you in the Mac App Store.
Leawo Blu-ray Player
The two currently available Mac Blu-ray apps come from Chinese companies. Shenzhen-based Leawo's is by far the cheaper – as in, it's free – and while it's perfectly adequate, you definitely get what you pay for.
I tested Leawo's player with a selection of discs from every major studio (plus Criterion, for you cinephiles out there), ranging from titles I bought back in 2009 to discs released in 2018. They all played just fine, with a crisp picture and clear sound. Leawo's menus let me easily switch audio and subtitle tracks, and jump between different video files on the disc with a Playlist option. And unlike hardware Blu-ray players, it's not region-locked, so you can watch discs from all over the world.
App To Watch Dvd On Mac Windows 10
But bones don't get much barer than Leawo's offering. It doesn't support Blu-ray menus at all; if you want to view special features, you'll need to guess at their location from the Playlist menu. If you're dying to watch, say, The Sound of Music's pop-over interactive commentary with sing-along mode, Leawo's app will not be one of your favorite things.
The app takes a solid minute (I timed it) just to load a disc, a process that requires multiple un-intuitive menu clicks, and whoever ported it into Mac didn't bother to change the drab Windows-like interface.
If you just want to watch Blu-rays on your Mac, Leawo will definitely do that. It's perfectly serviceable. It doesn't seem to install spyware or bother you with ads. But there's a better (and considerably more expensive) choice if you want a more robust experience.
Macgo Blu-ray Player Pro
Hong Kong-based Macgo's Blu-ray Player Pro usually sells for a whopping $79.95, though you can watch for frequent sales that will knock the price down to a still-lofty $39.95. On the App Store, with a 'family' license to run on multiple Macs, it'll cost you $64.99. (There's a marginally cheaper non-Pro version, but like Leawo's app, it doesn't fully support menus, so why bother?)
For that price, you'll get an experience nearly identical to popping a disc into any regular Blu-ray player. Macgo's app played my test discs flawlessly, with full support for menus and a virtual remote that even mirrored the what-are-they-even-there-for red, blue, green, and yellow buttons on the average Blu-ray remote. Its interface isn't Mac-like, but it's clean, intuitive, and unobtrusively minimal.
Discs loaded quickly — 15 seconds, tops – and played the same pre-roll ads and trailers they would in a hardware player, though thankfully, I could skip them just as easily as I would elsewhere. The app offers hardware acceleration for smoother playback, though aside from loading speed, I didn't notice a difference in quality between it and Leawo's app. Macgo's app even supports BD-Live online features, though you'll have to go into the Preferences to turn that feature on; it's switched off by default. I couldn't tell or test whether Macgo's app was region-free, but I'd be surprised if it weren't.
The only shortfall I found in Macgo's app, besides its price, was its lack of support for 3D or 4K UHD Blu-rays. I'm sure that's a dealbreaker for some folks, but most users probably won't lament it.
Maybe just don't
In hindsight, Steve Jobs may have been right to keep Blu-ray drives out of Macs. On a laptop screen, you may not be able to fully enjoy the HD splendor of a great Blu-ray picture. (And hauling around an external drive plus discs would make the experience a lot less portable.) Desktop Macs with big screens already have Netflix, iTunes, and lots of other less noisy and expensive ways to watch HD movies.
For the same $120 - $180 you'd shell out for Macgo's app and a good external drive, you could buy a decent Blu-ray player to hook up to your big-screen TV. (Reputable names like Sony and LG offer region-free players you can score for $100 or less with a little comparison-shopping.)
If you don't own a TV or a Blu-ray player, do own a Mac, already own an external Blu-ray drive for some other purpose – like ripping the Blu-ray discs you own for your personal digital collection – and really, really want to watch Blu-rays specifically off the discs, you'll likely be pleased with Macgo's app, and reasonably satisfied with Leawo's.
But with so many other, less troublesome ways to watch movies on your Mac, maybe you're better off leaving this particular bag of hurt alone.
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