Blu-ray in fedora

Any recommendations for a blu-ray player for linux? I have a blu-ray drive on my laptop and can't seem to get it running..

 

Blu-Ray is a spiffy, encrypted technology that doesn't have any legal players available for Linux. Or can you not even read DVD's and such with it?

There's a reason people complain about DRM... this is why.

 

Leaving the license discussion aside for a minute, the only Linux player that supports technically playing BluRay is, surprise, mplayer. However, to be successful, you should build the most recent version of mplayer and ffmpeg from the current source tree. This is why subversion is usually recommended, (or folks mention the "subversion version of mplayer" in their howtos), for checking out the source from the project site.

Having said that, it's not easy to play the BluRay DVDs under linux. You may have to decrypt them first, and you should know how to build stuff from source. Here's the Ubuntu guide, and an Ubuntu forums thread, and here's a similar Gentoo forums thread describing the process. As you see, it's still rough going. You basically need to make sure you have a UDF 2.5 filesystem driver installed, and the aforementioned bleeding edge versions of mplayer and ffmpeg, and you still may need to decrypt the DVD in order to play it.

And as Pita mentioned, there's no officially licensed BluRay player for Linux, ( PowerDVD is the officially licensed Windows player), and likely won't be. Finally, and even though you didn't ask, my two cents, is that you shouldn't support BluRay (or HD-DVD) at all. Buying, playing, or even looking at those DVDs, leads to the software (Movie houses) vendors exerting more and more control over us. Not a good thing. There's technology in here (BluRay/HDDVD) for cool things like;

AACS means that Blu-ray and HD-DVD will never be compatible with free software

"Hacking" your player, for example to remove the region coding, or playing a bootlegged disc, may lead your player to self destruct.

Mandatory Managed Copy ("official digital backups") technology while theoretically allowing things such as streaming content from one part of your house to another, was implemented so that the studios have the option of charging you money in order to do that, and your player also has to be connected to the internet.
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And considered, but not implemented (yet?);

The MPAA had planned to require that your player be connected to the internet at all times for it to function, period.

The MPAA considered having each disc being playable by only one player. (if you played a new movie in your player, your friend couldn't watch the same disc in his player)
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Good Luck..