Re: dumb question about blu ray drive configuration and playing blu ray movies etc....
Thanks a lot for enlightening me about this................
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Roland Rosier <rrdebian@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>
> 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.
I guess it depends what you would be trying to achieve here. If you
were trying to produce your own film and then distribute it to the
world in general who mostly owned Blu ray players connected to their
HDTVs then this would not work I suppose.....
>
> 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.
>From my point of view if you bought blu ray player it costs about the
same as buying a blu ray PC drive. The PC drive can record and play
back..... So at a dumb level I thought that it seemed far better
value for money to buy the PC drive and have it play commercially
released movies through the TV and burn movies you might have produced
yourself in a format that others could also playback (more sensibly on
their PC blu ray drives connected to their HDTVs not on a blu ray
player - I would dispense with the blu ray player altogether). But I
now see from reading this that there all these anti pirating
strategies that make such a simple approach untenable it would seem.
A blu ray disk recorder seems to be pretty expensive.......
> 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.
>
In principle this says to me that having the blu ray drive in the PC
playing the film is superior than using a blu ray player because I
assume the player doesn't use these protocols (but maybe I am wrong
here) this is an extra sophistication you get for the same financial
outlay.
> 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.
>
>
> 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.
It is a shame that this is such an obstacle course. It seems to be a
story of taking something simple and making it unnecessarily
complicated and labyrinthine or however you spell that word. I
personally like to have the DVD set for each new release of Debian
because it does install faster than doing a net install especially if
your internet connection is busy and if it goes down you can get deb
files from the disks...... But now the DVD set is getting pretty big
so a Blu ray set for Debian would be good I think any way.........
Regards
Michael
>
> I hope that this helps.
>
> Regards,
> Roland Rosier
>
>
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