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Tag-Archive for » Blu-ray «

Play Blu-ray Movies on Your Mac Without Converting Them First.

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris H.

Lots of people want to watch Blu-ray movies on their Macs. Until now, though, doing so required ripping the movies to your hard drive and playing them that way. Mac Blu-ray Player from Macgo is a movie player that plays back Blu-ray movies from the original source discs.

How does it work?

First you need a Blu-ray drive. Fortunately, OWC just happens to sell some. ;-)

Download & install the Mac Blu-ray Player application from Macgo.

After inserting a Blu-ray disc and launching the Mac Blu-ray Player application, you will be prompted to select your disc or a backed up .iso image. You must be connected to the Internet for the application to decrypt the disc for watching (a point brought up when this was discussed in OWC Radio, Episode #57). After the application scans the disc, it begins playback. Article Continues…

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Category: App Review
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OWC Radio #57 – There’s a Lion on the Horizon

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011 | Author: OWC Michael, OWC Grant, OWC Mike H., and OWC Chris S.

Apple’s newest operating system, OS X Lion is due out this month and we’re waiting in anticipation of how it will be received by consumers. With the mixed reactions to iCloud and the almost unanimous discontent with Final Cut Pro X, one can’t help but be curious as to whether the OS will bring together the pride or make some feel like the prey. Additional topics include Fair Use & Copyright infringement, Blu-ray playback in OS X, does your 4g wireless measure up, and much more!

OWC Radio is a monthly, forum-based podcast focused on the events and happenings in the Mac community. This week’s hosts are: OWC Grant, OWC Chris S., and OWC Mike H. Article Continues…

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Category: OWC Radio
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Blu-ray and Macs? With OWC, Yes!

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

While fairly common on many Windows boxes, Mac OS X does not support playback of Blu-ray movies on your Mac, and it’s not likely to do so any time soon. That means that if you’ve added a Mac mini to your home-theater system, want to watch HD movies on the road, or even if you just don’t have a lot of space for a TV and a computer, you’ve got to copy and convert the data from the discs in order to play them back and that’s impossible without a drive capable of reading Blu-ray discs.

Unfortunately, this Mac/Blu-ray gap also goes the other way too; the HD home movies that you’ve edited together in iMovie, Final Cut, or even Adobe Premiere are all HD, but how are you going to get them to your (or perhaps your mother in law’s) television to take advantage of the larger screen and/or the better sound quality? Sure, iDVD will get them to a disc playable anywhere, but you’ll lose that wonderful HD quality. For widest HD support, you need to be able to burn a Blu-ray movie to disc.

In both these scenarios, the lack of a Blu-ray drive is the main problem. Though you can’t play the movies themselves back, OS X will mount Blu-ray discs on the desktop; you can rip them using a program such as Handbrake. On the other side of the coin, programs like Roxio Toast Titanium can burn Blu-ray discs that will play in any home Blu-ray player. You just need a drive that can read and burn Blu-ray discs. Article Continues…

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Category: Product Spotlight, Tech Tips
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OWC Unveils Industry’s First Plug And Play Three Screen Home Theater Media Center Solution For 2010 Mac mini At Macworld Expo 2011

Thursday, January 27th, 2011 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Options include enough capacity to hold up to 6,145 hours of DVD quality movies with Mercury Pro Qx2 RAID storage solutions up to 12TB – – and the ability to make copies of purchased CD/DVD/Blu-ray media with OWC’s Slim portable bus-powered drive

Pre-configures 2010 Mac mini as home entertainment media server with first three screen (PC, TV, mobile) interface that simplifies and improves how content is viewed and managed across multiple devices

Other World Computing announced today its new OWC Media Center Solution for the 2010 Mac mini to address the growing need of consumers wanting to search, navigate, consume, store/backup, and sync digital content from multiple content sources and devices with one easy to use solution. The OWC Media Center Solution includes installing the Plex digital media management platform onto a customer’s 2010 Mac mini, upgrading the mini with 4GB of OWC RAM, and bundling all the necessary hardware – including an OWC Mercury Pro™ Qx2 storage solution, OWC Slim portable CD/DVD/Blu-ray disc burner, Elgato EyeTV Hybrid tuner or HD DVR, and Apple Remote – to deliver a complete and hassle-free Plug and Play Mac mini based home theatre/entertainment solution. OWC will be demonstrating the new OWC Media Center Solution and other first-to-market products, like the OWC Mercury Aura Pro SSDs for MacBook Air models, in booth #513 at the Macworld Expo, which begins today in San Francisco, California. Article Continues…

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Category: Press Releases
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New Beginnings – OWC Radio #43

Monday, October 4th, 2010 | Author: OWC Michael, OWC Chris S., OWC Grant, and OWC Mike H.

OWC Radio starts a new direction in this episode. While OWC Radio bids a fond farewell to Tim Robertson as host, the new OWC Radio has moved to a forum setting hosted by the four most prolific posters to the OWC Blog: OWC Grant, OWC Chris S., OWC Michael, and OWC Mike H.

Join us as we explore some of our first experiences with Apple computers and discuss whether or not the iPad marks the future of touchscreen computing. Other topics of conversation include the announcement of Star Wars in 3D, Apple’s ever-increasing popularity, how to get the most bang for your buck in purchasing a Mac, and more!

Article Continues…

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Category: OWC Radio
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Add Blu-ray Capabilites to Your Mac.

Thursday, July 8th, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Unless you’ve been living on an uncharted desert island for the last few years, you’re probably aware that Blu-ray won the High-Definition format wars.

You’re also probably aware that, while fairly common on many Windows boxes, Mac OS X does not support playback of Blu-ray movies on your Mac. That means that if you’ve added a Mac mini to your home-theater system, want to watch HD movies on the road, or even if you just don’t have a lot of space for a TV and a computer, you’ve got to copy and convert the data from the discs in order to play them back and that’s impossible without a drive capable of reading Blu-ray discs.

Unfortunately, this Mac/Blu-ray gap also goes the other way too; the HD home movies that you’ve edited together in iMovie, Final Cut, or even Adobe Premiere are all HD, but how are you going to get them to your (or perhaps your mother in law’s) television to take advantage of the larger screen and/or the better sound quality? Sure, iDVD will get them to a disc playable anywhere, but you’ll lose that wonderful HD quality. For widest HD support, you need to be able to burn a Blu-ray movie to disc.

In both these scenarios, the lack of a Blu-ray drive is the main problem. Though you can’t play the movies themselves back, OS X will mount Blu-ray discs on the desktop; you can rip them using a program such as Handbrake. On the other side of the coin, programs like Toast 10 Titanium Pro can burn Blu-ray discs that will play in any home Blu-ray player. You just need a drive that can read and burn Blu-ray discs.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that Apple is going to be including Blu-ray on its computers any time in the near future. OWC is coming to the rescue with its Mercury Pro Blu-ray “Quad interface” optical drives. Let’s take a look at the pricing/features of just the drive solutions:

Article Continues…

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Category: Product Spotlight
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Suggested New Years Resolution: Backup your photos and videos!

Friday, January 1st, 2010 | Author: OWC Michael

Well, with the holidays finally here and gone, many of us are left with fond memories of the past year and, depending on how avid a photo-taker or videographer you are, you’ve accumulated a ton of pictures and video of family, friends, vacations, pets, parties and the like. Now is a perfect time to check your data backup plan and to make sure that if your hard drive fails, you don’t lose all those memories.

While having a working hard drive backup is great, there is an even better way when it comes to digital media.  Make yourself a hard copy of your photo and video libraries from time to time. I’m talking about burning those files to Blu-Ray, DVD, or CD depending on the size of your collection, the physical size of your photos and videos, and how long it’s been since your last hard-copy backup.

With all your memories backed up this way, you’ll be sure to have them in the future. Not every backup plan is foolproof – so the more ways you back up, the better. A few years ago my backup plan included cloning the hard drive in my laptop and keeping a copy on an external drive. That way I’d have a perfect copy of everything on my computer. I was performing the cloning function and writing over the backup drive when the hard drive in my laptop physically failed. I lost everything on both drives – the main drive failing corrupted the data on the drive I was backing up to.

My only saving grace was that I had just about everything that was most important to me burned to CDs. It took a while to install a new drive, reinstall the operating system and move everything back over from CD – mainly because there were so many of them. Had I had copies on DVD, or better yet, Blu-Ray it would have gone much quicker.

Last month, OWC introduced the 12x “Quad Interface” Mercury Pro Blu-ray External Drives, which is ideal for backing up large amounts of video, photos, music, or any other data files Blu-ray is capable of burning up to 50GB of data onto a single Blu-ray disc in 15 to 20 minutes. That’s equal to 50,000 JPEG images, 17,500 MP3 songs, 25 DVD quality movies, or just under four hours of High Definition video! The Mercury Pro Blu-ray drives also read and/or write virtually all types of optical media, including DVD R/RW & Dual-Layer, DVD-RAM, and CD-R/RW.

Its the perfect device for making that New Year’s Resolution to make sure your data is kept safe and secure.

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Category: Product Spotlight, Tech Tips
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A Fresh Look At The “Old” Rules of Upgrading

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | Author: OWC Grant

About a year ago, OWC CEO Larry O’Connor revisited a recurring topic in his Tips n’ Deals Newsletter and OWC Chris covered that in a post on how the Rules of Upgrading rarely change.

Both of them explored five different ways you can upgrade your Mac to extend its useful life. Since some time has transpired, some new machines were released by Apple, and Snow Leopard has now become a reality, it’s time we take a fresh look at some “old” rules of upgrading:

#1 – Upgrade Your Memory
owc8566ddr3s16sI think we’ve lost count of how many times we’ve talked about how upgrading your memory gives you the best performance boost for the investment. Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 is a 64-bit (along with its applications) which allows each application to address more than 4GB of RAM at a time. OSX’s memory management now is a lot more flexible in keeping its cached instructions, lessening the need for a hard drive hit.

The bottom line is simple: Your OS and Applications can certainly run on the minimum memory, but having more memory installed makes for a whole lot more enjoyable and productive experience, all for a low investment. With upgrades ranging from $44.97 for a 2GB module for a MacBook, through 16GB of RAM for an iMac, up to a full 32GB of memory priced at $27.25 per GB to max out your Mac Pro, a memory upgrade is dollar-for-dollar the best investment you can make for your Mac.

You can find memory (and other upgrades) for nearly every Mac produced over the past two decades with our easy online upgrade guide. In addition to the instructions you’ll find in just about any Apple computer manual, we’ve got easy-to-follow free installation videos that further illustrate how easy it is for you to get that memory into your Mac. And if you need further help, it is just a click a way in our online tech center.

#2 – Upgrade Your Storage.
The big news for 2009 was the rapid pace of developments in storage capacity, speed, and overall performance. Now we’re talking up to 2.0TB for 3.5″ drives, up to 1.0TB for 2.5″ drives, and SSDs have truly emerged as a legitimate consideration. Since we promised SSD benchmarks in our last coverage of this upgrade, we’re going to focus on them here. I did a comparison of how SSDs measured up to hard drives and SSDs were the speed, reliability, and quiet running champs. Just how much faster are SSDs? Check it out: Article Continues…

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Category: Benchmarking/Performance, Tech Tips
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