[SOLVED] Blu-ray player?

[JerryP]

Does anyone know if there is a blu-ray player available?  I bought a blu-ray drive and thought (hoped) it would just plug in and work. I searched Synaptic for all things blu-ray and installed them.  I put in a blu-ray disc and although I can open the disc with my file manager I can't seem to find anything that will play it.
 

[aguila]

Nope, No luck.

Not even Fluendo.

[menotu]

Could see whether these couple of VLC links help.......

http://www.videolan.org/developers/libbluray.html

http://www.videolan.org/news.html

Edit:

In Synaptic I also came across this

libbluray0

Blu-Ray Disc playback library for media players libbluray is an open-source library designed for Blu-Ray Discs playback for media players, like VLC or MPlayer.

For BD-J support, you need to install libbluray-java.

This package does not contain any DRM circumvention functionality, so you can only play unprotected Blu-Ray discs with it as is.

[aguila]

Unlike DVD Blu-Ray is not yet cracked, but e.g. Windos can play them in Mediacenter, as M$ pays a licence / co-ownes the code?

[T6]

sorry jerryp

linux and apple are not in this party yet

only sony ps3, the now cheap bluray players and windows machines running the right software(often provided with the drive)

you can convert the contents to a file after decrypt the files and open it with vlc or mplayer and similar but directly, haven't heard about that yet

there was another post asking this question but i don't remember if there was more information, it was a old post so new information could be available now

[JerryP]

Good thing I didn't read these replies before watching the blu-ray disk, not that it was especially smooth.

I was able to open the disk and found a directory called BDVM. In there were several other Dirs but one was STREAM and in there were 3 files, 00000.m2ts, oooo1.m2ts and 00002.m2ts.

I started trying players and found VLC didn't work but then tried MPlayer and surprisingly it played the first file. This turned out to be half the Blu-ray. The next file was the other half and the last was the credits. The only thing annoying (beside it not playing straight through) was that the voice sync would go out now and then for about 10 seconds but then it would "calm down" and be OK.  I don't know if they all are burned this way but this one was and I was able to watch it.

So, good for me for this one and don't know if I will ever be able to do it again.  Gotta say the video quality was pretty spectacular.

Thanks for all you comments and suggestions.  Since the industry seems to be leaning on this pretty hard it think it will only be a short matter of time before Linux will have to have it.

[aguila]

well that's kinda good news. Sure we'll have it sooner or later.

[Was_Just19]

Good thing I didn't read these replies before watching the blu-ray disk, not that it was especially smooth.

I was able to open the disk and found a directory called BDVM. In there were several other Dirs but one was STREAM and in there were 3 files, 00000.m2ts, oooo1.m2ts and 00002.m2ts.
.....

That is excellent news indeed ......  particularly if it turns out to be universal.

It would be interesting to hear from others who have BD media that they can examine.

[cyrwyn]

It's interesting to note that my Sony BDP-S560 standalone BluRay player has Linux as its operating system. It's also network upgradable. I haven't found any information on hacking it yet.

[jfdesign]

I started trying players and found VLC didn't work

i can play m2ts on vlc since the day one.
my sister had a panacsonic hd camcorder which records the videos in m2ts format and wants me to help converting to standard dvd format for her big lcd screen because she have no idea what the bluray is nor hdmi. m2ts according to wikipedia is a high definition MPEG-2 Transfer Stream format used in Blu-ray discs and AVCHD. Playing them directly from the camcoder using hdmi to my 40″ Bravia is perfect, but when I transfered the m2ts file to my desktop and play them with vlc … it doesn’t play nice … it was too jerky and way to far for calling it smooth.
After googling it I found some tricks on vlc settings that worth a try. All you have to do is, go to Tools – Preferences in VLC, select Input & Codecs option and select BiDir from the drop down menu for Skip H.264 in-loop deblocking filter. I choose “BiDir” instead of “ALL” because this keeps the quality yet renders smoothly. Save the preference and play the video. The video should be smooth and perfect.

[JerryP]

Thanks. I'll be exploring this further. I have a cheap blu-ray movie on order that I will play with.  I had to give back the one I did watch.  One thing I did try was converting it with Handbrake. It looked like it did it just fine (to m4v) but took a looong time and when I tried to play it is was a psychedelic experience of small colored blocks. I didn't look into the handbrake setting when I tried it since it "just did it" but since it didn't I'll check into that too (unless someone else beats me to it).  It still surprises me with the seeming popularity of blu-ray that the devs haven't cracked it yet.

[JerryP]

For anyone interested in knowing, Handbrake is the way to rip blu-ray BUT it seems to be a strain on the system ("things" seem to get unstable and after ripping I restart x) and takes a pretty long time (5+ hrs).  The blu-ray file is HUGE (16-20GB) and resides in BDMV/STREAM xxxx.m2ts.  It's easy to find because if the size.
It also seems necessary to check the "large file (>4GB)" option or it may not come out right. 
I have successfully ripped 4 discs to MP4 (m4v) which I am able to watch on my iPod Touch or Android phone or even my computer.

[coffeetime]

What about k3b?

[MerReady]

I know everyone is looking for a native solution, but I wonder if something can be done through wine. I have a blu-ray burner in my gaming machine. Maybe later this week I'll and another hard drive to it and install PCLOS and find out.

[JerryP]

What about k3b?

k3b doesn't even recognize blu-ray _.m2ts files and it thinks that the disc is CD and doesn't read it. Not all players play the disc nice either.  The ones I find that work OK are GNOMEplayer, KMplayer, Mplayer and VLC. I prefer VLC and have no problem with it.