Never mind the fact that there isn't a single, true blu-ray playback app for the Mac. The real problem is that OS X and apps written for OS X perform incredibly poorly when playing back compressed HD. And by that I mean perform poorly when compared to Windows apps.
I believe this is the real reason for Steve's "bag of hurt". Many Macs simply can't smoothly playback the typical video found on a blu-ray. I don't know if this is due to inherent inefficiencies in OS X, a lack of development in this area or if it is an OpenGL vs. DirectX thing.
And this is all made worse by the fact that, as of now, there is practically no hardware decoding acceleration on the Mac. From what I hear, Apple did finally make some APIs in this area public last spring, but that has not yielded much progress. The only app I know of that makes any use of any hardware acceleration is a beta version of Plex and even then only on a very limited set of video cards.
But it's not just about hardware decoding acceleration. Even with hardware acceleration turned off, my modest, 3-year old Windows box (2.2 GHz AMD Phenom) plays blu-rays with ease. I'm talking blu-rays with h.264 and VC-1 video up in the 40Mbps+ range. Whereas my 3-year old MacBook Pro (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo) can't even smoothly playback an h.264 video in the 13.5Mbps range. The difference is even worse when talking about VC-1 encoded videos. This is a huge difference in performance between Windows and OS X. Now, granted, I'm comparing roughly 3-year old machines and the latest Macs may have enough raw horsepower to cover up this difference in efficiency, but the difference is still there.
I'm primarily a Mac guy, so this is very disappointing and frustrating. Maybe there is a pleasant surprise just around the corner, but I'm betting not.
