How to play Blu-Ray video on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

To play Blu-Ray video on Ubuntu, you need to decrypt files first.

The "AACS" Digital Rights Management system on all Blu-Ray discs attempts to stop consumers from exercising fair use rights, including:

• Playing films using standard digital (DVI) or analog (VGA) cables and monitors, which generally do not support HDCP encryption, without a 75% reduction in resolution.
• Playing purchased Blu-Ray movies using open source software.
• Fast forwarding or skipping advertisements.
• Playing imported films, including when local equivalents may be overpriced or not available.

Blu-Ray player applications require their unique player (or "device") key to play discs. These keys are issued by AACS-LA to approved manufacturers that implement the restrictions mentioned above. This player key can decrypt volume key of each movie, which in turn can decrypt the content of the movie to play it.

However the AACS DRM is ineffective and does not successfully prevent any of these things, because:

• Player keys for all Windows based software players, such as PowerDVD are known publicly. These can be used to find the volume keys for discs that don't have newer keys than those discovered. While these applications now have new keys (and future HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs won't play with the old keys), it's likely the new key will be discovered too as all players must store their keys in memory at some point.
• The volume keys needed to play many released movies are known publicly. Even without a licensed player key, Linux HD-DVD and Blu-Ray software can use these to play discs.

For Ubuntu 9.x you will need MPlayer and FFMPEG. Ubuntu 9.10 contains a version of Mplayer that is capable of reading decrypted Blu-ray files.

Many Blu-Ray discs use DRM protection. To decrypt such discs you can use DumpHD. You will also need a current keydb.cfg file, which contains the decryption keys required to your movie.

If DumpHD cannot rip your disc, you can try the MakeMKV. This program contains a decryption key that has not been revoked, and may have more success in ripping your disc. MakeMKV is not as advanced at removing the BD+ protection on certain discs.

Please note that you will need up to 50GB of free hard disk space to store Blu-Ray video on your hd.

1. To remove decryption from a Blu-Ray disc, insert it into your drive and run DumpHD
   

   sudo ./dumphd.sh

2. Select the disc as the source (a directory somewhere beneath "/media/Movie Name" and a directory like "/tmp" to save the movie content.
   You can proceed onto the next step once .m2ts has started decrypting.
3. Play the the decrypted movie from your hard disk with mplayer, specifying the video codec:
   

   mplayer -fs -vo xv -demuxer lavf "/tmp/movie_name/XXX.m2ts

4. If you can't play the file, the disc might be protected with BD+. Try to remove BD+ first.