www.makemkv.com

I have successfully copied the contents of a Blu-Ray disk to my Apple iMac computer. This results in a collection of large bitstream files in a subdirectory STREAM. These files are good, I can play them back on my iMac using (for example) VLC.app.

I would also like to access the original menu system that was present on the Blu-Ray disk. Mostly, I would like to see a menu of chapters and select one of them using a mouse pointer. I would also like to be able to turn on closed caption (or subtitles, or whatever they are called) from a menu.

Is this possible? Can you suggest a MacOS app to use for this purpose?

Thanks for any suggestions.

What you did is a backup of the Blu-ray, this process copies every file and structure to the backup location. You must click in MakeMKV on the big disc icon and you come to a selection menu, select what you need and press start. This process creates mkv files (one for each selected title, but the main movie is copied in one mkv file), after this you have the movie with chapters, subtitle selection and so on.

If you want to use the menu system, you need a BD-aware program to do it.

@arnstein If you want to watch blu-ray movies using the regular menu functions, you can try the MacGo Blu-Ray Player Pro though this is a paid player app. https://www.macblurayplayer.com/index.htm


I’m using the MacGo Blu-Ray Standard edition on my Mac but most of the time I use VLC player. With VLC player, you can navigate thru the different chapters including the special features. VLC 3.06 version can also play 4K UHD fine in Mac without washout colours, and no freezing or lagging. You’ll need to modify the settings of the Cache Value and Hardware decoding.

Grauhaar wrote: ↑

Thu May 02, 2019 7:05 am

What you did is a backup of the Blu-ray, this process copies every file and structure to the backup location. You must click in MakeMKV on the big disc icon and you come to a selection menu, select what you need and press start. This process creates mkv files (one for each selected title, but the main movie is copied in one mkv file), after this you have the movie with chapters, subtitle selection and so on.

Hello Grauhaar,

Thank you for the clue. I have performed the procedure that you outlined and indeed, MakeMKV created some .mkv files for me. But as far as I can tell, this collection of .mkv files has the same functionality as the .m2ts files that are created by the backup procedure. In particular, I can play all of the files individually with vlc.app. However I do not find any menu functionality. I do not find any files that could possibly contain menus, only the .mkv files.

Am I missing something? It would be helpful to me if you could explain what benefit there is to creating the .mkv files at all, given that I already possess the .m2ts files.

Thanks for any ideas!
D.A.

The MKV container has no Menu support, it can only store the stream files. Using single M2TS files is not a good idea, because a movie can be separated into many single M2TS files which are descriped by the MPLS (the Playlist).

If you need the menu, see the other postings.