[Macworld]

Post your comments for OWC Mercury Pro 8X Blu-ray External here

[keyhorndude]

This may be a stupid question, but will it play normal retail blu ray discs on you mac? How about plugging my macbook into my HDTV and using it as a blu ray drive?

[fireblue]

There is no current support in OS X for playing Blu-Ray movies.

Apparently 'that a whole lot of pain' or something along those lines.

Should come eventually though as it is now the standard for HD Movies in disc form.

[cseeman]

keyhorndude, on 29 September 2009 - 04:02 AM, said:

This may be a stupid question, but will it play normal retail blu ray discs on you mac? How about plugging my macbook into my HDTV and using it as a blu ray drive?

No and that has nothing to do with the player. There is no software capable of playing Blu-ray video discs on the Mac. The issue centers around the copy protect used on commercial Blu-ray discs and the modifications Apple would have to make to support it. Apparently this also impacts burned discs that obviously aren't copy protected as well.

[cseeman]

fireblue, on 29 September 2009 - 04:08 AM, said:

Should come eventually though as it is now the standard for HD Movies in disc form.

Maybe not ever. The changes to the OS to support the copy protection are significant it can/will have impact on other aspects of the OS's functionality which may slow it down. Apple is banking on downloads overtaking Blu-ray although I don't see how that'll happen for several years. For example Apple TV is limited to 720p24 whereas Blu-ray is 1080 and at much higher data rates (better quality). Many people don't have the bandwidth to make large downloads or live streaming practical. Many Blu-ray players cost less than AppleTV now. Disc rentals are inexpensive. Netflix charges a few dollars more to include their Blu-ray library and they will look much better than Netflix livestream service.

When AppleTV allows for 1080p24 high quality rentals and 720p60, 1080p30, 1080i60 video playback on AppleTV they may eventually have an argument agains Blu-ray. In any case your best bet is to buy a burner and a sub $200 player and hook it up to your HDTV.

[dbso]

So it can't be used as a player, and to be honest, it's usefulness as a burner are questionable. For personal backup I think large hard drives end up being cheaper and more reliable. For sending through the mail, even if you have a lot of data to send, CD or DVD media would be cheaper and more likely to be usable on their end.

I wonder though if you can boot into Linux/Windows and run a BD movie that way.

[turbineseaplane]

Would the drive play commercial Blu-Ray discs if you were to use it connected to a Mac and using it on a Virtual Windows 7 copy in VMware for instance?

Anyone know?

[Homina]

Blu-ray playback capability does not exist in either Windows XP or OS X. There may be provisions for it in Vista, but I don't know either way. If Vista can play Blu-rays, and Blu-ray hardware is recognized by Vista, then there's no reason it shouldn't be usable under a virtual emulation. The OWC drive comes with Windows drivers, and its manual is oriented to Windows users.

My experience with OWC's Pro 8X drive is at serious odds with the reviewers in this article. I've sent my OWC drive back twice. The second returned drive should be here tomorrow. I had a single successful burn with it, out of more than 10 attempts. It failed with a "-5001" disk error every time. I couldn't try the eSATA connection, but the interface used didn't appear to matter. In every case the OWC drive was the sole device on its bus, too. OWC returned the first drive after ascertaining that it successfully burned a CD. That was not helpful, as the reason I returned it was that it failed to burn DVDs, not CDs. They said they'd evaluate the drive's different burn capabilities the second time around. We'll see. OWC sells two Blu-ray external drives, a Pioneer and an LG. I bought the LG (OWCMRF8UEBDW8T) due to its LightScribe capability. I've already advised OWC that this is its last hurrah. If the drive doesn't work as advertised this time, it's going back for good.

I should note that in every case of a failed burn on that OWC drive, the same job burned without a hitch on a Plextor or a LaCie burner. It's not my system or the interface, it was the OWC drive that was at fault. Based on how unreliable the OWC drive was, I didn't even entertain the idea of trying to burn a Blu-ray disk on it. I tried the OWC drive under 10.5.8 and 10.6.1, with different brands of media. My machine's a 2007 Mac Pro octo with 16GB RAM.

[elroth]

to Homina:

Sorry to hear about your problems. Your OWC burner is not the one reviewed in this article, right? Yours is the OWC with an LG burner, not the Pioneer. That would make a difference - the review (about the Pioneer) could be spot on.

Good luck.

[Halibut]

I installed the OWC Pioneer internal in my MacPro's second DVD slot with a SATA connection directly to the motherboard. OWC provided the cable with the drive. It works like a champ!

I use it for permanent backup of my original AVCHD files of HD video. These individual files are often 16GBytes. So far as I am concerned, there is no alternative to Blu-ray for permanent storage of files this size. Tape drives with this capacity are very expensive, and are a serial medium - you must rewind and search for files on the tape. In addition, tape is less robust than optical media.

I personally, have never had any problem reading any optical media in more than 20 years.

The inability to view Blu-ray video is a major shortcoming for high-definition video production on the Macintosh.

[Homina]

OWC returned my LG Blu-ray external drive (OWCMRF8UEBDW8T) for the second time, and it's still got serious problems. Its FW800 interface was the only one on which it would successfully burn a disk, and only inconsistently on that interface. (I couldn't test its eSATA interface.) Given the premium price for this drive, that was flatly unacceptable. A conversation with an OWC tech confirmed that the other OWC Blu-ray drive that uses the Pioneer mechanism used the same bridge card, so it's not likely to fare any better. It's going back today for the last time.

Halibut: I assume you're using one of the two unused SATA connections on the motherboard, behind the optical bays. I tried using those in the past, but experienced thermal sensor errors that made it impractical. How did you route your cables to avoid that happening? And which OWC Blu-ray drive, exactly, were you able to install in your other optical bay? Your use of a Blu-ray drive is precisely why I'm interested in getting one: to archive AVCHD files. I've been using hard drives on Mac Pro sleds, but that involves powering down-and-up every time, wear-and-tear on the connections, and even smaller HDs are more expensive than Blu-ray disks.