Blu ray + ubuntu?

Hey quick question trying to move my htpc os to ubuntu but wanted to know if they found a way for me to play blu ray movies on ubuntu without ripping it?

 

Sorry, but information on that would be illegal in the US.

I really wish I were kidding.

 

oh didn't know that i guess ill stick to windows os.

 

Meh.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD

 

Indeed.

For me it's more: Grrr

AFAIK there is no authorized BluRay player for Linux. As such, in order to play your legally-obtained BR disks under Linux, you have to bypass the DRM (copy protection.) Since circumventing a "copy protection mechanism" is a crime under the DMCA that means that there is no legal way to play your legally-obtained BluRay disks if you use Linux.

Awesome. Naturally, this has stopped piracy cold, since pirated copies of material are subject to the same restrictions.

Hang on. I think I may have made a mistake. Apparently, this actually only affects legal owners of BluRay disks, and doesn't do a damn thing to stop people with pirated content. Huh.

Well at any rate, that's what's up.

Now it's unlikely that violating the DMCA to play your own disks would ever result in your being prosecuted, true, but it's still illegal all the same.

 

Or you could ditch the optical discs? Kind of a dying technology, isn't it?

The only way they could popularize set-top Blu-ray players was by incorporating streaming capabilities. Now we have "Ultraviolet" which is convoluted way of selling Blu-ray discs by including some sort of DRM streaming to sell physical discs. Again, streaming is being used to sell an obsolete physical medium. Notice a pattern here?

Blu-ray is simply a failed early 2000s technology. It's time to move on.

 

I don't know if I'd call 2006 the early 2000's, but I certainly share the sentiment that physical media is annoying. The fact that prototypes existed several years earlier doesn't really count. Major tech companies always have prototypes of their tech well in advance.

Of course, you can't find legal bluray quality digital downloads of movies. Amazon and iTunes have decent HD offerings, for example, but it's just not the same. Obviously, there's nothing inherent in those technologies that makes them worse, it just works out that way. I think they use relatively low bit rates to increase streaming compatibility.

 

The Blu-ray format is a lot older than most people realize, since it got off to such a slow start in the market. The prototypes were working in 2000, it came to market in Japan in 2003 but didn't hit United States until 2006.

I wouldn't concentrate very much on Blu-ray quality. That's more a Sony marketing slogan. The truth is that digital compression has advanced a lot since the year 2000.

 

BR movies tend to have much higher bitrates for both video and audio than *any* download you can find of a given movie, legal or otherwise. That alone makes it a big deal to people who care about quality.

 

The market has spoken and streaming is being used to sell Blu-ray players and the physical discs themselves. Optical discs are going the way of floppies and it seems likely that as formats disappear, the DVD might outlive the Blu-ray.

I think the real problem is that a lot of older people still associate a physical medium with content. Discs are going away and good riddens to bad rubbish in the case of Blu-ray.


For the Linux community, the lack of a Silverlight support is currently more of an issue that Blu-ray support. Legal streaming is the future, although the universal format will most likely be HTML5.

Personally, I think the bitrate argument is isolated to the A/V enthusiast community. I remember the same sort of arguments from LaserDisc devotees at the time of DVD proliferation. I can still remember the Blu-ray and HD-DVD announcements back when Bill Clinton was President, and even then, both formats sounded like expensive losers.

 

Oh, absolutely. But this isn't LD vs DVD: this time it is a direct comparison.

Most HD streams are well below 1/5th of the bitrate of a good Blu-ray mastering. Does that matter to most people who watch it on some $400 Best Buy discount TV? Not one bit. I agree that for those people it's a purely academic argument at best.

But for somebody with a decent home theatre setup -- and yes, I'm biased in this regard -- a 7 mbit/s re-code is a way worse experience than a BR encode with 20+ mbit/s for video alone.

(All that said, I don't have and never will have a Blu-ray collection or player. Ever since Sony committed multiple counts of computer crimes by knowingly exploiting and infecting their customers' computers, I've refused to purchase any product from them or their subsidiaries, which pretty much rules out BR since they'd get the license fees even if I don't buy a player from them. So really, I'm not in their target market...)

 

Blu-rays also use digital compression. In fact, they often use precisely the same type of compression as is used in many HD digital download formats (like from Apple, for example).

It doesn't change the fact that the quality is way way higher on your average blu ray disc versus your average digital download (or any digital download I've ever seen)

Again, there's nothing inherent about the technology going on here. It's just that your average movie on a bluray might be 20-30 GB. Your average HD digital download might be 3-5 GB.

You can even transcode a bluray using handbrake and x264 with extremely high quality down to about 8 GB, using a variety of fancy x264 options, if you're willing to let a fast quad core work for 30 hours. Faster encodes without the fancy options, on the other hand, can produce larger files 12 GB+ that look much worse (obvious artifacts, blockiness). Those encodes might also have slightly higher compatibility with legacy devices, depending on how the encoding options are selected.

Anyway, the fancy x264 encodes (as opposed to a vanilla x264 encode) down to about 8 GB look much better than any digital download movies I've ever come across. Presumably, not only are digital downloads about half the total file size they should be, but also aren't using all the fancy modern x264 encoding options (possibly for some combination of compatibility and convenience).

Blurays encode at such a high bitrate (and have such a large file size) that the fancy encoding options don't make much of a difference. You don't need an amazing encode if you're willing to have a large file size.

Side note: uncompressed 24 bit 24 fps 1080p video takes about a Terrabyte for a 2 hour movie. You can compress that down to about 300 GB losslessly (like flac for audio), or about 8-10 GB transparently, but not 3GB. It's similar with MP3s. You've got lossless 16 bit 44,100 fps audio. It's like 600 MB for 2 hours, or 300 MB with lossless compression, or about 80 MB with transparent compression, but not 40 MB.

This is almost exactly the same issue as with digital music downloads. When music downloads became popular, the defacto quality level was 128 kbps from all major digital outlets. It's not that digital downloads are terrible, but 128 kbps just about half of the needed bitrate for high quality. Same thing with digital downloads today for film. If they get their act together and approximately double their file sizes and use a high quality modern format, then digital downloads will be close enough to bluray so that I'll shut up.

 

That's actually part of the rationale for the massive storage requirements: by using such a high bitrate, you don't need tons of B/ref frames or other demanding H.264 features -- and since you don't need those, the player hardware gets *much* cheaper and easier to implement.

Your post was spot-on, BTW. That's a very good explanation of why such "obsolete" tech. isn't.

As an aside, that's also the reason that I still buy hundreds of dollars of CDs every year. Rip them with cdparanoia, encode them with FLAC, and I've got a higher quality, DRM-free copy of the music that I can do with as I please. If I give up such "obsolete" technology, I end up with lower-quality, less-compatible copies... and I pay more for that privilege (assuming that I can even buy them, which, in the case of iTunes, I can't.)

Sometimes it feels like we're going backwards, it really does...

 

Isn't VLC 2.0 supposed to bring Bluray playback to all platforms?

 

Yes, I've read that. The final release of VLC 2.0 was yesterday, I believe.

The release notes state:

 

To be fair, I was appalled when Sony put a rootkit in supposed audio CDs. I also thought it was lousy when Sony deleted the OtherOS feature from PS3 after having advertised it. To take it a step further, I no longer regard Sony branded devices with the same level of admiration that I did only a few years ago. As companies go, Sony is a falling star. I'm actually amazed that Sony has been able to survive all of the losses of recent years. They must have had a huge stockpile of cash leftover from the now distant Walkman era - you know, pre-iPod.

My real issue with Blu-ray is that its a physical format in a digital world. Yes, I do realise that a Blu-ray disc contains up to 25-50GB of data. That would have been handy as a back-up medium back in the days when I still thought of optical disks as backup media. Neat a bad idea back in 2000. Retrotech in the year 2012. Actually, the Blu-ray felt like retrotech 5 years ago, too.

 

well i dled that yesterday put a blu ray and did nothing lol. maybe you have to add something as well.

 

You do. You need to have a program that can decrypt a Bluray disc because VLC won't do that. Once decrypted, you can either stream the video from the decrypter program to a player like VLC, or you can use your decrypter program to rip the Bluray disc to a non-encrypted backup file, and then play that file with a player like VLC.

Here's an APC Magazine article that describes the entire process for streaming the video. Among a list of decrypt programs, there are two that are currently available for Linux, that are referenced in the APC article. The command line DumpHD, and the commercial MakeMKV.

Good Luck..