2 Easy Ways to Open/Play ISO Image Files on Mac

ISO file is a disk image of an optical disk, which contains everything written on DVD, but more handy. These files are the sector by sector copy of the entire DVD contents, which can be termed as the complete representation of an entire DVD. Therefore, a DVD ISO image file owns large file size - almost the same file size as original DVD disc. Then, how to open and play an ISO file directly on Mac without mounting to a DVD drive or burn it to a blank disc? If you tried to directly play an ISO file with QuickTime Player on Mac, you would end up with failure. Feel frustrated? Never! There are always solutions to get ISO playback on your Mac.

In this article, two easy ways are introduced to help you play ISO image files on your Mac computer without any trouble. One is download a third-party ISO player program while the other is to transcode ISO image files to MP4 or other digital files for more convenient playback and save space.

Method 1: Installing A Third-party ISO Player to Play ISO File on Mac

Actually, there are many third-party video players that support ISO playback on PC and Mac. Here are the top 3 recommended video players to help you play ISO files on Mac directly.

1. VLC for Mac OS X

VLC Media Player is very popular for good reasons. It is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player and streaming media server that supports almost all file formats without the need to download additional VLC codecs as well as can optimize video and audio playback. VLC Media Player has excellent tools for tweaking video and audio playback, it can play formats nobody's mentioned for years including play DVD and ISO files.

2. 5KPlayer

5KPlayer is a media player developed by a software company for the users, so they can high-quality playback videos like 4K resolution and 2K resolution. A VLC alternative that enables the users to watch high-quality videos struggles to play on your computer. With it, you can open and play ISO file directly on both Mac and Windows. In addition, the ISO player can also play DVDs, and almost all video and audio formats including MKV, FLV, MP4, AVI, H.265, MP3, AAC, FLAC, etc.

3. Kodi

Kodi can be used to play almost any popular audio and video format even including play DVD discs. It's designed for network playback, so you can stream multimedia from anywhere in your home or directly from the Internet using virtually any available protocol. Kodi uses the video player "core" for video playback called "DVDPlayer". Based on FFmpeg, DVDPlayer now supports all popular formats that are widely used. A relatively unusual feature of this DVD player core is the ability to play DVD movies stored in ISO and IMG DVD images or DVD video (IFO / VOB / BUP) images.

Method 2: Converting ISO Files for Playing on Mac, iPhone, etc. without Any Limit

The file size of a 90-minute DVD ISO image always ranges from 5 GB to 8 GB, which takes up too much space. And the huge file size may also cause the player to freeze, crash, and cannot play the full title when playing. In addition, some ISO files fail to play because they are encrypted and many devices and platform cannot play DVD ISO image files. Therefore, another efficient and easy solution to play ISO files on Mac is to encode/re-encode DVD ISO image to digital file formats.

To get the job done, here we sincrely recommend EaseFab DVD Ripper. Built with powerful decryption technology for (DVD region code, UOPs, CSS encryption, Disney's fake etc.) copy protected ISO images and encrypted movie DVDs, even those Disney DVD movies with X-project DRM, it can convert DVD ISO to any mainstream video formats including but not limited to MP4, MKV, MOV, AVI, HEVC, H.264, etc. with excellent output quality and fast encoding speed. Besides, it has 420+ built-in preset device profiles to convert ISO image to iPhone iPad, Android Samsung, HTC, etc on the journey.

Simple Steps to Convert DVD ISO to MP4, MOV, etc. on Mac

Step 1. Install and run EaseFab DVD Ripper on your Mac. Click IFO/ISO button to load the DVD ISO image file you want to convert. Batch conversion is supported so you can add multiple ISO image files to convert at a time.

Step 2. Click Profile bar and select an output format. Here you're recommended select MP4 (codec: H.264 + aac) from Common Video category since MP4 is widely supported by almost all players, devices and platforms. If you want to convert ISO image files to MP4 for iPhone, iPad, Samsung Galaxy, Google Nexus, etc., you can browse to find any video preset as the output format.

Tips: Flexible options are offered to further reduce the size of the encoded MP4 video. You can click Settings button beside the profile and enter into the parameter settings page. A slew of other variables such the video/audio codecs, pixel dimensions, frame rate, bit rate, audio sampel rate, etc. will help convert a large ISO image to a smaller MP4 file.

Step 3. Hit the Convert button to begin the ISO to MP4 conversion on Mac. Once the conversion completes, you can enjoy your ISO image files on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc. without any trouble.