Forums | MacLife

I'm not really sure what the HD tab is for in the DVD Player preferences.  I have a Blu-Ray burner in my Snow Leopard hackintosh.  When I pop in a Blu-Ray movie, it shows up on the desktop, but I can't open it up in DVD player.  If I use DVD Player's "Open DVD Media..." option, the mt2s files are grayed out.  And if I "Command-option-drag" the file onto the DVD Player icon, I get "mt2s is not supported" or something along those lines.

The closest I've come to getting this to work in OS X was to make an unprotected Blu-Ray backup, and open up the m2ts files in VLC, but even then, the video got garbled after a few seconds of play (the VLC guys are working on this, but I wouldn't expect a solution in the near future). 

Really, the only way to play Blu Ray discs on a computer is with Windows and a third-party player. Cyberlink's PowerDVD works well, and will even offload video processing to your GPU, if it's capable enough.  The only question is whether your iMac can handle it.  The two critical components are CPU and GPU.  If the GPU isn't fast enough to decode Blu Ray content, you might have to do everything on the CPU -- which will probably work, but I wouldn't make any assumptions.  What kind of specs do you have, anyway?

It looks like the 9400M has you covered.  This article mentioned < 20% CPU usage when decoding with this chipset.  Unfortunately, he didn't mention the format and bitrate of the source material (some Blu Rays are tougher to decode than others).  Another thing to consider is that Apple sometimes underclocks parts to meet the increased cooling demands of a compact machine (more so with laptops).  And the CPU used in the article is the beefier desktop version of the C2D.

However, if we assume the worst in all the above, I still fell pretty good about your chances of playing Blu-Ray without issue (with Windows and PowerDVD).