Too Blu-ray Aye

September 16, 2008 1:38 PM

Will my iMac G5 play blu-ray movies?

If I bought an external blu-ray drive and connected it to my iMac G5 (17" 1.8ghz 2GB), would said mac be capable of playing blu-ray movies?

posted by popcassady to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

My 1.8Ghz iMac G5 stutters on 720p h.264 content, so I'm inclined to say no. Some blu-rays discs are are authored in MPEG-2 (less processor strain). However, if/when blu-ray playback software arrives the Mac, a dual-core Intel processor is likely to be required. More information about playback requirements are here (although it's Windows-specific, much of the article is platform-agnostic).
posted by porn in the woods at 1:48 PM on September 16, 2008

(like you, I have 2GB of RAM in my machine, the maximum)
posted by porn in the woods at 1:50 PM on September 16, 2008

It might be capable processor wise, but IIRC there is no Blu-ray playback software for OS X.
posted by wongcorgi at 2:17 PM on September 16, 2008

"would said mac be capable of playing blu-ray movies?"

No. Hardware constraints aside, you don't own any software willing to play the movie back because no such thing exists for the Macintosh. This goes double for the PPC architecture, for which you won't even have the option of running Windows and using the extremely dodgy software Blu-Ray players available to that platform.
posted by majick at 2:22 PM on September 16, 2008

Even my massively overpowered Powermac G5 with 4 2.5ghz processors stutters decoding highdef content.

I attribute it mostly to the fact that the codecs aren't as optimised for the Powerpc as they are for the Intel architecture, but I only do that to make myself feel better so I can sleep at night.
posted by Jerub at 4:28 PM on September 16, 2008