Mac Photos Library Backup To Blu Ray - Part 4 Mac Toast 11 Pro

As I mentioned previously, that my MacBook Pro had Toast 11 on it and would not handle Blu-ray disks.  However, what I had was Toast 11 Pro:

 

As you can see from the picture of the box, it does have the software upgrade to handle Blu-ray drives and discs.  Opening Toast 11 Pro shows that it understands BD-R and other Blu-ray discs and that the TsstCorpBDDVDW SE-506CB drive has been found.

With the Gravity 3D Blu-ray disc installed in the TsstCorpBDDVDW SE-506CB drive, its 29gb disc size is visible.

However, as I had already upgraded to Toast 14 at this stage, I am not sure that the complete Blu-ray functionality is due to the Toast 11 Pro having all of it, or due to the fact that the installation of Toast 14 added the bits Toast 11 Pro needed.

I therefore will not continue this research using Toast 11 Pro, but will move straight to Toast 14, this will be covered in Part 5.

#fixed1tMACsupport

Mac Photos Library Backup To Blu Ray - Part 3 Loading Blu-ray disc

Having selected the:

Samsung SE-506CB/RSBDE Apple Mac Compatible Blu-ray Writer

I plugged its micro USB cable into my Apple MacBook Pro and of course nothing happened.

Assuming that my Apple MacBook Pro was capable of reading Blu-ray discs using the Apple Video Player, I decided to test the Blu-ray films compatibility with my Mac by loading a Blu-ray DVD.

I did a quick hunt around my DVD collection and found INCEPTION Blu-ray disc and put it in the Mac.

Picture of INCEPTION film on Blu-ray DVD

I am disappointed to say the disc did not spin up and start playing.  I disconnected the Blu-ray drive and restarted but absolutely nothing happened.

After searching the web and the Apple Support site I discovered that the older Apple Macs do not have support for Blu-ray drives built into them.

So Macs can't natively play Blu-ray DVDs, but rather than get side tracked into solving this problem, I decided to stay focused on backing up my Photos and Videos to writable Blu-ray discs.

The best disc burning software for the Mac has always been Toast. A quick get info showed I had Toast Titanium 11.2 installed on my Macbook Pro.

Picture Showing The Results Of Get Info On The Toast Application

As it was version 11, I assumed that it should be cable of seeing Blu-ray drives, so I opened it up and was disappointed to see that Blu-ray was not a recognised option.

So the next task is to look at updating my version of toast to one which is compatible with the Blu-ray standard. I'll cover that in my next blog entry.

#fixed1tMACsupport

edited Unboxing A Samsung SE-506CB/RSBDE Apple Mac Compatible Blu-ray Writer

Brad thanks for pointing out the dark matter at the end of my previous Samsung Blu-ray Writer video.  I edited it with youtube's own video editor assuming (wrongly) that it would be as good a quality and just crop the previous video.. but I was wrong.  It created a new one with the right length, but with somewhat vaseline coat graphics ;-) either that or filmed through a smoke filmed room.  Multi Billion Dollar Companies and they can't get simple editing right.  Malcolm (aka fixed1t) #fixed1tMACsupport

Mac Photos Library Backup To Blu Ray - Part 2 The Technology

Despite all the Hi-Tech things I do, I'm running a fairly old MacBook Pro 17" which is 3+ years old and I'm running Yosemite, as can be seem from the About This Mac dump below:

What can also be seen from the system report below is that although it can read and write to CD's and DVD's.  Writing to DVD's does give me the option of saving my data to 4.7 gigabyte DVD disks, but the 23gigabytes of video or photo sample data would eat 4 - 5 DVD's and take a long time to back up.

One would have thought that given that the Sony Blu Ray format has been around for a number of years, that the latest Apple drives would be able to Read Blu Ray and Write Blu Ray by now.

Unfortunately, my research has turned up a strict negative with this respect.  Apple Macs do not natively possess an internal Apple drive that can write a Blu Ray data disk.

So the problem highlight in the first video:

Mac Photos Library Backup To Blu Ray - Part 1 The Problem

Still needs to be resolved.

In the next blog/video I'll investigate the Mac Compatible Blu Ray drives I considered.

To Be Continued...

#fixed1tMacsupport