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:

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