RE: dumb question about blu ray drive configuration and playing blu ray movies etc....
Hello Micheal,
I have attempted to create a HTPC using Debian recently and one of the biggest problems was trying to play Blu-Ray disks.
Whilst I believe that it is possible to burn Data Only Blu-Rays on Linux using K3B, this is a different issue to burning a Video Blu-Ray that can be read by a standalone Blu-Ray player.
This is because a Blu-Ray readable by a stand-alone Blu-Ray player has to adhere to a whole set of standards that define the way that the disk is formatted.
For instance, the first issue is that playable Blu-Ray disks have to be formatted as UDF 2.5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Filesystem). I don't know if K3B (or any other Linux tool) can create UDF 2.5 filesystems. My K3B (admittedly on SuSE) doesn't have options to select UDF filesystem type and I suspect it would create an earlier version of UDF.
If you have a PC connected to your TV, I might suggest that your easiest option (at this point in time) would be to create Data Blu-Rays with your home-made video in a format of your choice. Then play your home-made video from your Data Blu-Rays via your PC on your TV with the player of your choice.
You can indeed connect your PC to your TV via an HDMI lead if your TV has an HDMI input and your PC has a video output which is either HDMI or convertible to HDMI. A DVI-D connector should be convertible to HDMI, although you might not have the Audio channel that is normally carried in the TDMS channel on HDMI. However, I do have a recent nVidia standalone PCI-Express card and a recent ATI on-board graphics card which do output HDMI-compatible / HDMI-direct signals which contain the audio channel. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visual_Interface).
Another possible option would be if you have a newer TV which can understand one of the uPnP/DLNA protocols. If you set your PC up as a server with a uPnP/DLNA protocol that your TV can understand and also able to serve the video in a format that your TV can understand, you might be able to get your TV to play the movie itself, reading the movie from your PC. However, my TV can't do this and I have read of people having problems trying this with TV manufacturers trying to "extend" the standard or otherwise make it not-fully compatible with the official standard.
As far as playing mainstream Blu-Ray disks on a Linux system (or even a PC in general) there are a whole host of issues to overcome.
Basically <rant mode="on">the Blu-Ray manufacturers have become so concerned with preventing the piracy of their disks that they have decided to prevent legitimate owners from being able to watch the Blu-Ray disks they own on the hardware they also own.</rant>.
When I was researching HTPC on Windows, I noticed that quite a few pre-built systems seemed to include a tool from a company called Slysoft (http://www.slysoft.com/). I get the impression from the posts I saw that even people who buy a Blu-Ray PC player, an HDCP-capable graphics card (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection) and an HDCP-capable Monitor and/or TV are prevented from playing their Blu-Ray disks by the encryption. The Slysoft program provides on-the-fly decryption to allow Windows users to watch their Blu-Ray disks. Sadly I believe that it only works on Windows.
Another Windows tool is DVDFab (http://www.dvdfab.com/). I believe that it works by creating a decrypted copy of the Blu-Ray (either the whole image or individual movie files) on your harddrive. I also read that it can be made to work with Wine.
A Linux tool is dumphd, which I believe also creates a decrypted copy of the Blu-ray. This is available in Debian Testing/Squeeze. Sadly this tool can only decrypt early Blu-Ray disks. I think I read somewhere that it will only decrypt those with MKBv from 1-10. The latest disks are up to something like 16 or 17.
Even if you can decrypt your Blu-Ray, you then have to play the Movie. The video can be encrypted with 3 formats: MPEG-2, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and Microsoft's VC-1. Fortunately I believe that MPlayer, VideoLan, Xine and MythTV can play all of these.
You also have to figure out what file is the main movie file. On older Blu-Rays I believe that these tended to be the biggest .m2ts file in the BDMV/STREAM directory. On newer Blu-Rays, this might not be the case. It is possible that as an added complication, the movie may be split into multiple small files which are all bound together by a playlist in the PLAYLIST subdirectory. I am not aware that any current Linux tools can either read the playlist files or can use the playlist to re-assemble the .m2ts files.
It is possible that MakeMKV (http://www.makemkv.com/) is able to solve all of these issues by transcoding the Blu-Ray into a MKV format container. I did read somewhere that it can run on Wine. I don't know if it can re-assemble a split movie from the playlist. However, I have read that MPlayer, VideoLan and Xine can understand MKV format containers.
In summary I would say the following:
Playing Commercial DVDs in Linux seems to be relatively pain-free. Many players can understand the whole DVD structure and/or individual files within. However I have read that a newer type of encryption is appearing on DVDs, but I haven't seen it personally.
Playing Commercial Blu-Rays in Linux seems to be a hit-and-miss challenge. The encryption keeps changing so what works with the Blu-Ray you buy today might not work with the Blu-Ray you buy tomorrow. I don't know of any Linux player that can understand the whole Blu-Ray structure and it is possible that split-playlists might defeat Linux players. There was even some talk online of key-revocation which might mean that your Blu-Ray player might stop playing a Blu-Ray that it played previously.
It might be worth sticking with DVDs until Blu-Rays are playable on Linux without any hassle.
I hope that this helps.
Regards,
Roland Rosier
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