Out of the box, your Mac can do almost anything, but playing Blu-ray movies isn’t one of them. Not only do Macs not ship with Blu-ray playback software built in, but Apple still doesn’t make a drive capable of reading Blu-ray discs. Fortunately, with a little inexpensive hardware and software, you can turn your Mac into an awesome Blu-ray player. The Hardware To play Blu-ray movies on your Mac, you’ll first need a drive that can read the discs.

Apple’s SuperDrive won’t do it, but there are plenty of good third-party options that’ll do the job. Sperry pilot drivers for mac. There are plenty of compact, affordable choices for this in the sub-$50 range that connect via USB. With a Blu-ray drive connected to your Mac, all you need is an app to play the movies. Brings powerful Blu-ray features to the Mac, including Dolby Digital audio, fine audio controls, and multiple playback modes.

It even lets you play Blu-ray ISO files directly, so the player itself is optional. With Mac Blu-ray Player installed, just insert a Blu-ray disc or click Open File in the app and browse to your ISO file to get started. With the movie loaded, you can click around the main menu normally, or use the app’s built-in navigation panel to choose chapters to view, select your audio settings, and enable subtitles. You can switch up your viewing mode on the fly to choose the best screen layout for any situation. In the Video pull-down menu, choose between half-size, fit-to-screen, full-screen, and other options on the fly. Or just drag the corner of the window to size it manually.

For the ultimate movie experience, connect your Mac to a set of 5.1 surround-sound speakers. Mac Blu-ray Player supports DTS 5.1 surround sound and Dobly Digital for awesome audio quality. Pro Tip: Most DVD playback software won’t let you capture images from your movies.

With Mac Blu-ray Player, you can. Just click the Snapshot button in the menu at the bottom of the screen, and the app will let you save the current frame as a JPEG, PNG, or BMP file. Playing Blu-ray movies on your Mac is an awesome experience that liberates your movie experience from the confines of the living room. Visit Aiseesoft now to exclusive to Macworld readers. This story, 'Turn your Mac into the ultimate Blu-ray player' was originally published by BrandPost.

Ok, looked at the teardown again - the optical drive is 12.5, im sure that the 12.7mm drive will fit into the mini (even if it's almost useless - why should i buy an overpriced device, void the warranty to put a optical drive in it - only to use the drive with windows?? You can have a full working digital engine from aopen, put in a blu ray drive and could use it in the same way - the largest difference is the design (ok, thats why so many people are getting mac's in the first place)) - but the functionality of the digital engine is way better than the mini (like 1 x hdmi and 2 x vga) - and i paid for my board with C2D cpu and 2gb ram less than 100$ - btw, it runs great with windows and snow leopard;-). I just purchased the MacMini (mid-2010) Server edition. I have the exact same question about 12.5mm 1TB drives fitting or not.

It surely would be nice to up the ante on the internal space from 1TB to 2TB, albeit a drop in speed from 7200 to 5400rpm. Nonetheless, the higher data density I think will sufficiently offset the somewhat loss in rotational numbers.

As for the optical drives, there is a very easy solution (at least for me). Just purchase an external model. Given the fact I have the server model there is no slot to accommodate the internal for one.

My external Buffalo Blu-Ray drive not only handles Blu-Ray but is also backward compatible with DVDs anyway. I have it primarily for archival purposes anyway moreso then watching movies. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, you can convert / downsize Blu-Ray movies from 50GB or whatever to a more manageble, less overhead, but still very good quality, say, 8GB,.MP4,.MOV,.MKV or whatever you might like. Just ISO them to an image file. Store the ISOs on inexpensive 500GB 2.5' drives, mount the ISOs, and voila! Ready to go!!

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Delete the ISOs of movies you didn't like so much and don't ever intend to watch again. Recover storage space and the most efficient way to deal with the optical disk side of the equation. Still will like to know about them 12.5m height 1TBs though.

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And, more fundamentally, how difficult to remove / upgrade. Cheers, TokyoJerry. Update After just posting the above, I discvoered the answer to my question: Seems like I won't be inserting any 1TBs any time soon with this fresh information. Actually, the easiest way to resolve storage needs or requirements is to simply attach external 2.5' / 3.5' storage cases via USB or FW.

I sure wish Apple would begin to incorporate USB3 designs into their hardware. The rest of the world is on USB3 already. Then, it won't really matter whether or not you boot / process from the inside or outside.:-). So it sounds like you just pulled your HDD from another mac mini with Leopard and Windows 7 already installed, plugged it into the 2010 Mac mini and everything booted up with no issues in regards to Hardware incompatibility with windows and Nvidia video drivers. There was a post on here in regards to isues with Nvidia video drivers on mac Hardware running windows OS etc. Does bluray output work properly via HDMI port? Is there 5.1 and any of the lossless codecs work as well ie TrueHD?