The Blu Ray Disc or BD, is a name for an optical disc standard which uses blue-violet laser instead of red laser used in CDs and in DVDs. This allows manufacturers to store more data using the same amount of disc surface. It is 1.2 mm in thickness and 120 mm in diameter. One Blu-Ray disc will hold approximately of data on one side/layer of the disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc.
A BD can come with single, dual, triple or quadruple layers with a capacity of 25 GB, 50 GB, 100 GB and 128 GB respectively. Triple and quadruple layer Blue Ray discs are basically made for BD-XL Blu Ray rewrite drives. These discs are not used by movie production companies for distributing their movies.
To play Blu-rays, you at least need a Blu-ray drive and Blu-ray playing software. For Windows platform, there are several tools to help you fulfill that like PowerDVD, TotalMedia Theatre, VLC Media Player, WinDVD Pro, etc. VLC is one of the most popular media players used in personal computers today. Both Windows and Mac version are available and the latest version supports Blu-ray playback. It is free but can only play Blu-rays recorded by users.
But if you want to play commercial Blu-ray disc on Windows, you need to use the commercial software application like CyberLink PowerDVD, WinDVD Pro, Total Media Theatre 5, etc. for the purpose(with built-in BD drive). Even when people purchase the BD drive separately, the drive would most often come with the necessary software to decrypt and play BDs.
To play Blu-ray on Mac is similar to Windows. But what software you should have is a Blu-ray Player for Mac. Here we recommend the Aurora Blu-ray Player for you. It can play both commercial and common Blu-rays. It is also an all media player software, which means that, it can play DVD, VideoCD, video, audio, etc. The tool can decrypt the HDCP, AACS, BD+ successfully and play Blu-ray without limitation.
The Aurora Blu-ray player for Mac is easy to use yet practical tool. It can play Blu-ray disc, folder, ISO files. With the simple navigation panel, you can customize the audio track and subtitle first before your playback. The player is also a social tool which allows you to share the film info and comments with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.
