How to add a USB Blu-ray player to your Mac for $42

9to5 Staff | Jul 2 2012 - 7:06 am PT

With 1080P hitting the new iPad and Apple TV a few months ago, and the new Retina MacBook Pros now reaching people’s hands, some of you are perhaps now looking to send your Blu-ray collection over to Apple devices.

Here is the easy part: Buy a Toshiba Lightscribe Blu-ray Player for just $42 with free shipping (via 9to5Toys) in white or black. It also burns DVDs, and Lightscribe media will even do some art on the cover. Oh, and it is USB bus-powered, so it is nice and portable.

Toshiba advertises it as “Mac compatible,” but we all knew that the late and great Steve Jobs viewed Blu-ray as a “bag of hurt” from the “mafia.”

So, the hard part is getting Blu-rays to your Mac…

Macworld recommends the free MakeMKV application to pull data into an .MKV file. From there, you can use Retina VLC 2.0.2 to watch the video, or use your favorite converter (Handbrake) to move the video to iOS devices. There are a bunch of paid options (Toast 11 is $50 at Stack Social) for watching Blu-ray’s directly and turning them into iOS compatible files.

For lossless Audio:

Step 1. Rip Blu-Ray with MakeMKV. Select the biggest file, because that is the main title.
Step 2. Use MP4tools to remux the MKV file into a MP4/M4V file.
Sept 3. Find a copy of Handbreak 9.5 (newer version no longer lets you target file size), and then make the target file of conversion between 2GB and 3GB (2048MB and 3072MB).
Step 4. Get iFlick from M.A.S to tag and auto-add the files to iTunes.

Discuss below.