I have been researching high definition mediums, Blue-ray becoming the center of my focus. It offers high resolution video with 1920 × 1080 pixels and high resolution audio with up to 8 streams (for 7.1) of possibly uncompressed audio.

Whereas you'll want to output high definition video to your display, which likely is HDMI-interfaced and HDCP-compliant already, audio is another matter - especially for us sonophiles. It has been a fact from 2005 (Link) that there are difficulties involved in getting the pristine digital stream to a dedicated DAC.

How do you play Blue-ray-disks on an Apple Macintosh?

Short answer: Not easily.

Longer answer: It works if you...
* Have a Blue-ray-capable drive connected. * Run Microsoft Windows (using Bootcamp, Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion) on your computer. I think this is nasty ;-) * Run Slysoft AnyDVD HD to disable the copy protection, which I expressly do not recommend as it might possibly be considered a criminal activity! * Use a PC player software (e.g. VLC to access the M2TS containers).

Why would you want to do this?
* You have a nice big (digitally accessible) screen anyway. * You want to route the audio streams to a DAC of your choice, connected to your Mac.

The cost will be around 250 US$ (110 US$ for the drive, 80 US$ for the emulation, 60 US$ for the access enabling software) - and then you have to get Windows to run --at a sufficient speed for Blue-ray-playback-- and route the audio back into Mac OS.

Is there an easier way?

The way I'll (try to) go is...
Get a standalone Blue-ray-capable player with S/PDIF audio output, coaxial or optical according to your input solutions.
Beware*: You'll get 6 channels, no 7.1 currently, at resolutions of up to 96 kHz (with DTS). * Connect the HDMI-output to your (HDCP-compliant) screen. * Feed the S/PDIF into your Mac's or your audio interfaces' digital input. * If you did the former, use Soundflower to route the audio to (a decoder if you are dealing with a Dolby Digital or DTS-encoded stream and feed the linear PCM to) the DAC of your choice.

Please don't look confused! After all you wanted to know :-)

Sidenote

PC-based Blue-ray-playback of movies secured with AACS requires a Protected Video Path (PVP) as well as a Protected Audio Path (PAP) for all but linear-PCM-streams. This means that compressed high resolution audio >16 bit and >48 kHz (e.g. Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA) must be downsampled to 16-48. [Link, 11/05/2008]

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