My Experience with Debian Linux and Blu-Ray Disc

I decided to get the Alien Anthlogy on Blu-Ray disc without looking to see if my Linux machine running Debian Linux supported playing Blu-Ray discs.

When the Blu-Ray arrived I discovered that Blu-Ray was encrypted and Blu-Ray Plus movies where even more difficult to play.

After some searching around I found the libbluray, libaacs, vlc media player and libbdplus.  The libbdplus is recent as of 8 months ago and is available here.  I am waiting for better support for linux using libbdplus which would enable me to play a Blu-Ray Plus dvd.  It was fun trying to get AACS keys to work with the libbdplus, but in the end I was unable to.  It is a combination of BD-ROM firmware and having the unencrypted keys which is a pain.

Instead I discovered MakeMKV and Handbrake.  MakeMKV will rip a Blu-Ray disc to MKV format and Handbrake can encode it into something that you could use on your phone.  This worked for me and lets me play the movie in linux just fine.