www.makemkv.com

Hello,

I am a first time reader, computer novice, to this discussion board.

I might have already posted by mistake, but below is the content I wanted to share and need assistance with.

Own: (Early) 2009 Mac Pro Desktop (MacPro5,1)
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 2 GB
OS: Mojave

Just purchased in May 2022 two optical drives:

WH16NS40 FWV 1.05 / Interconnect ATPI / (Generic Drive Support)
and
WH16NS60 FWV 1.03 / Interconnect ATPI / (Generic Drive Support)

How do I flash/reflash the WH16NS40 to get it to play like the WH16NS60? Currently, neither drive will play a blu-ray or dvd for that matter. I can open/close them, Finder shows the name of a blu-ray in whichever drive I put it in, but again, won't play.

Any assistance would much appreciated.
Thank you,
Michael

Well you Mac will never playback UHD with those specs it has no h.265 decoding.
You need a gtx 10 series or higher
If you just looking for regular bluray playback and you own makemkv just installed VLC then in makemkv preferences enable intagration and VLC open disc bluray and it should play VLC already does DVD on its own I believe.

Your Mac should have the Apple DVD Player application which should play DVDs. It won't play Blu-rays.

As Billycar11 said, VLC should work. If you rip your blu-rays (and DVDs) then things like MPV (my preference, installed via HomeBrew) or IINA should also be able to play the resulting .mkv files.

On a Mac, you don't strictly need an Nvidia card to do h.265 decoding. macOS has something called Apple Video Toolbox which is an OS level abstraction of hardware video encode & decode. On most Intel Macs, it comes down to whatever Intel Quick Sync hardware your CPU has. Intel Quick Sync started with SandyBridge CPUs in 2011.

Unfortunately in this case, I'm pretty sure a MacPro5,1 has an Intel Xeon Westmere CPU. That's the generation just before Sandy Bridge, so there's no Intel QuickSync Video. I have no idea how a GeFore GTX 770 factors in or what kind of support Apple Video Toolbox has for it.

My 2017 iMac18,3 has a 4-core i5 "Kaby Lake" CPU and a Radeon Pro 580 GPU. MPV supports using Apple Video Toolbox so when I'm playing a UHD rip if I hit CTRL+h it'll toggle hardware decoding, even on my Nvidia-less system.