Blu-ray recording on mac?
 

I tried using search, but it's down for maintenance right now. So, I'll post.

I need to look into internal blu-ray burners for my mac pro 8-core. I'm seeing some that say Mac-compatible, but very few, and more expensive. It seems that most bd burners out there are for Windows only. Now, I've heard from a few people that the reason they are windows only is that windows can play blu-ray movies and mac cannot. I don't care about playing movies, I just want to burn bd data discs and movie discs. I've also heard from others that unless it says it's mac compatible, it won't work for anything on a mac.

So, would I be able to buy any blu-ray burner to just burn movies and data on my mac?

Sure. Read this. Make sure you read Part Two too!

Thanks very much for the links! They helped a lot. I see now that likely any drive will work with Toast installed, because neither of the drives Ken Stone recommends say Mac compatible. The compatibility issue must just be that Mac won't play blu-ray movies.

Again, thanks!

Absolutely! The drive manufacturers not only ignore Macs, but they also usually state ONLY that their drives are "Windows Compatible". They all (nearly all?) work with Macs, though.

There is, of course, never any Mac software bundled with the drives - you need Toast 9/10 + BD Plug-in for that, but then you're good to go!

I'm 99% ready to dive into this, and have one quick question. The current version of Toast now 10, and it's available in Titanium and Titanium Pro. Both are supposed to author BD video discs, but the "Pro" version looks to have a bunch of other multimedia programs included. Are any of these worth the extra cash, or can I stick with regular Toast 10 Titanium?

Jason, you don't need Toast 10 Pro for Blu-ray production. Toast 10 (Amateur!) will do.

However, you DO need the "BD Plug-in" that is another $10 or so for download.

However, however, when I ordered Toast 10 (non-Pro) and before it was delivered, I ordered/paid for/downloaded the BD Plug-in, and then found the retail Toast 10 package had the BD Plug-in bundled as a free gift! Thanks, Roxio!

So: The moral of the story is: get your Toast 10 package first, and THEN see if you need to buy the BD Plug-in!

You don't need a blu-ray recorder to make blu-ray discs on your Mac. No kidding:

MacVideo - DVD Authoring - Features - Bruce Nazarian shows how to produce affordable Blu-ray

I now understand why ppl don't choose internal with a mac. I have a power mac which only has one opening for a drive (even though its a tower), which would mean I'd have to swap internal drives every time I wanted to burn a BR. And then you can't even test it because you can't play BR in a Mac. What a joke.

What about authoring menus? Will Toast do this as well or is another software like Encore suggested for this?

Toast will do simple menus that (as far as I know) you cannot edit. You can pick from a selection of templates, but I don't think you can edit them other than chapter point titles and such. Someone correct me if that's wrong because I don't have Toast v10, only v9, and I don't know for sure they didn't change that.

With Encore, you can create your own menus or edit the existing templates like you can in DVD Studio Pro.

Dan is correct about Toast.

So would you rank Toast as about as useful (flexible) as iDVD for the BR creation?

Thanks for the info about Toast. I guess I will have to look into Encore unless anyone else has a good experience with another software. By the way...can you buy Encore separately or do you have to by it in one of the bundles? I don't see it anywhere for sale separately.

I'm pretty sure you have to buy it in a bundle, which stinks. I have seen some bundled software for sale individually on ebay, but I wouldn't trust that source.

You don't have to buy the Adobe's Premium or Master collection. Adobe Encore DVD is part of Premiere Pro, that can bought seperately.