The state of BluRay movies on Linux

Zucca

I've been planning to buy a BluRay drive, so that I coud buy and rip (possibly re-encode) the movies into my home server. This is my plan to upgrade from DVD (Yeah, finally, right?).
But I've read a lot of stuff about BluRay ripping being very complicated because of the copy protection and even watching the movies (straight from the media) on Linux is a PITA. The other option would be to buy a digital copy, but those are usually only streamable so I wouldn't actually "own" a copy of it. And if there was a service that actually would allow me to download an actual movie file (preferably *gasp* legally, and assuming it would play fine with say mpv), then I'd be forced to do backups of them (at least the best ones), or burn them into actual disks.

So before I go and buy such drive I want to know if any of you does watch (or rip) Bluray movies on Gentoo (or on Linux in general).

Moderator Edit 2018-02-16 - we now have an entry on the Gentoo Wiki for Blu-rays. -beandog.
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..: Zucca :..

fturco · Veteran Joined: 08 Dec 2010 Posts: 1181

I'm also interested in buying a Blu-ray drive. The relevant article from the Arch Linux wiki may be interesting. But I haven't read it yet.

Zucca · Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2017 8:51 pm Post subject:

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3432

Buying it feels a bit counterproductive, even if it's cheap now.
I mean, it seems to be designed specifically not to work for you, so why would you want to give them your money? Let them starve.

Hard drives so far are nor affected, and they do a pretty good job at storing data. And they don't age as quickly as burned CDs do. (no longer readable after a year on a shelf feels like a bad joke).
Whether downloading is legal or not depends in large part on where you live. Youtube downloader and similar scripts are pretty good at ripping streams from the internet though.
Browsers often cache video played with flash players on local hard drive (you can copy it until you close that browser tab), or could be patched to store more "verbose" browsing history.

This said, I'm not much of a movie person, so I may not see it your way, but I myself stopped using any optical drives at all roughly at the time BD was entering the marked. Pendrives were so much more convenient already.

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

AFAIK the only practical option for Blu-Ray — if you want to stay morally clean — remains to buy a physical disc, ignore it, and pirate a copy that actually works. There's already good infrastructure for this setup because even 100% legit windows users get shafted by HDCP and the like.

Zucca · Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 6:12 pm Post subject:

fturco · Veteran Joined: 08 Dec 2010 Posts: 1181

As far as I know it's impossible to download torrents without uploading. You may stop seeding after the download is complete, but that's not fair to the p2p community.

Zucca · Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 8:12 pm Post subject:

arnvidr · l33t Joined: 19 Aug 2004 Posts: 629 Location: Oslo, Norway

I rip my BluRay discs without problems with MakeMKV on gentoo. I also re-encode them with handbrake to save some space, but the rip leaves you with perfectly fine MKV files that should work in any media player/center of your choice.
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fturco · Veteran Joined: 08 Dec 2010 Posts: 1181

MakeMKV is proprietary software as far as I know.

arnvidr · l33t Joined: 19 Aug 2004 Posts: 629 Location: Oslo, Norway

Yes, indeed, but I assume using proprietary software is preferable to illegal downloads.

Either way, it demonstrates that ripping need not be very difficult at all, and I assume it is possible to create a script using the open source libraries if you don't want to touch a proprietary piece of software.
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 10:38 am Post subject:

arnvidr,

The rip is easy. Its the decryption that's hard. Rips are still encrypted, unless you have some assortment of keys to do the decryption.
The encryption has not been broken yet. That's just as well as its what you use for on line banking.

Player keys were originally extracted form software bluray players where they were poorly guarded.
That's got harder and the early player keys have been revoked.

Its the usual protection/break the protection dance that's been going on since software was first distributed on floppy discs.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Zucca · Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2017 2:35 pm Post subject:

Well. I'll buy some cheapo USB3 BluRay drive then. I hope for the best.

I tried to set up Fedora (Yes. I do use Fedora too on few laptops. Crazy! Isn't it?) propely, by installing offical Google Chrome and all the neccessary (propietary binary) plugins into my wifey's laptop... But the videos on HBO site still doesn't work (no error messages either). I read that HBO uses some sort of copy protection there, but I should have the plugin... still no dice. Luckily the HBO sub is a free one moth trial. I hate the mess now... I should propably clean out all the propietary poop away from there as well...

The next best thing is BluRay. I hope it works.
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..: Zucca :..

fhede · n00b Joined: 15 Mar 2016 Posts: 43

Hello zucca.

I understand you want to use linux, but in this case when you have spare laptops over. Go for windows.
You have so much more possibilities.

anydvdhd or dvdfab to rip encrypted blurays. Have to buy.

tsmuxer to encode if you want/need. Free

bdrebuilder if you want to create bd25 to save space, but get same quality as full bluray. Free for testing.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=143716

imgburner for create isos. Free. ( use an old one) http://www.oldversion.com/windows/imgburn/ i recommend ImgBurn 2.4.0.0 free from commercial and other stuff.

makemkv.

I have the same situation but with lightroom, i only use my windows laptop because of that.( i know darktable exists)

arnvidr · l33t Joined: 19 Aug 2004 Posts: 629 Location: Oslo, Norway

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

I bought a BD-R device back in ... I think it was 2011. I never managed to watch a blu-ray movie with it. Not interested in ripping, I only wanted to stick in the disc and watch it.

I can watch DVDs and whatever easily enough, but the only thing the BD-R part is good for is making backups.

I haven't tried for years, but FWIW now I mostly watch online content anyway.

fhede · n00b Joined: 15 Mar 2016 Posts: 43

arnvidr · l33t Joined: 19 Aug 2004 Posts: 629 Location: Oslo, Norway

A watermark is not encryption, but I see what you mean. Anyway, as long as my player does not detect it, my backups might as well be clean.

And unencrypted?
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beandog · Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2017 6:41 am Post subject:

Ooh, blurays!

I was just working on this this week, and I figured out how to rip them directly using libbluray's bdsplice (no more MakeMKV).

Short version:

- emerge libbluray with aacs support
- download KEYDB.CFG and put in ~/.config/aacs/ (see http://www.labdv.com/aacs/ )
- run list_titles (part of libbluray) to find which title you're looking for (but use the playlist as an index)
- run bdsplice -p playlist /dev/sr0 movie.m2ts
- and DONE

If you don't like having it in an MPEG2 transport stream, you can super easy dump it to a Matroska file if that's your thing: ffmpeg -i movie.m2ts -codec copy movie.mkv

I started writing my own Blu-ray tools also this week, I just finished and released bluray_info today -- which can display the title information better than list_titles. See https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=625710 for the ebuild.

Also, re MakeMKV, it is commercial software, *but* it's free for Linux while it's in beta. And it works awesome, so I'd recommend that as well. I've written about how to use it a bit here as well. http://dvds.beandog.org/doku.php?id=makemkv

Edit: stickied the thread
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If it ain't broke, tweak it. dvds | blurays | blog | wiki

fturco · Veteran Joined: 08 Dec 2010 Posts: 1181

@beandog: what's your percentage of success with your method? how many bluray discs don't work?

beandog · Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2017 7:23 pm Post subject:

ronaldoc · n00b Joined: 03 Jul 2017 Posts: 15

fturco · Veteran Joined: 08 Dec 2010 Posts: 1181

@ronaldoc, @beandog: Thank you both for sharing your experience with Bluray ripping. I think I will probably buy a Blu-ray drive and some movies when I'll get more money :roll:

beandog · Posted: Tue Feb 06, 2018 9:42 pm Post subject:

I added a wiki entry for us about Blu-ray, lemme know if you want something on there, or just feel free to contribute yourself.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Blu-ray
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beandog · Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 8:27 am Post subject:

Soooooooooooooooooooo two things I found out tonight about MakeMKV.

One is that newer versions (1.10.10+) require that you have SCSI generic devices setup in your kernel, so you need /dev/sg* instead of /dev/sr* or it will whine and say you don't have any optical drives (and freak me out considerably in the process since I just did a complete system rebuild and was horrified if my bluray extravaganza career was over). So, enable that in your kernel. See here.

Second thing is I found out you can update your settings so that it won't check for a newer version available ... and then not run if you don't install it. That also makes me rage cakes as well.

In ~/.MakeMKV/settings.conf add: app_UpdateEnable = "0"

That is all, the end.

Sadly, I can't rip Frankenweenie though, but I guess you can't win them all. Le sad.
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If it ain't broke, tweak it. dvds | blurays | blog | wiki