blu-ray on gentoo

I’m pretty excited because I got my first BD-ROM drive last night from NewEgg, a LITE-ON iHOS104-06.  That means I can do some real testing, ripping and playing around.

Decrypting Blu-Ray discs is a really confusing process … I’m still not even sure of all the steps that are involved.  Everything I understand has been cobbled together from posts on the doom9 forums.  While the forums are a great resource, it’s not a comprehensive one at times.

I was playing around with aacskeys (from doom9 forums, available in portage), and it managed to decrypt / find the keys / whatever it’s doing / work successfully on most of my movies.  I’m not sure how to get them off after that, though, or why that’s important yet, but I do know it’s a good sign. 🙂

For now I’m taking the simple route of using shareware to access my movies.  There’s two programs I’ve used so far to rip my Blu-Rays, AnyDVDHD and MakeMKV.  They are both nice programs with some good features, but MakeMKV is the only one that has a Linux port.

The last time I tried MakeMKV, it couldn’t decrypt all my discs, so I had to use my PS3 to rip the ISOs, and then use AnyDVDHD.  This time, though, using the most recent version (1.5.6), it managed to decrypt all of my discs.  I was going through my Blu-Rays to see if it could handle all of them, but I gave up after the 15th one, since it was working on every single one. 🙂

While AnyDVDHD will extract the original, unencrypted files to your harddrive, MakeMKV will additionally mux them at the same time into Matroska.  I kinda wish I could still have the originals, but I’m not going to be picky. (Edit: you can, see comments)

So, no real plans after this except to play around and post my results.  I really don’t have that much interest in playing with Blu-Rays on Linux other than curiosity.  I don’t wanna rip them and stream them to my HTPC just yet since I don’t have the storage space, and because my frontend isn’t quite as HD-ready as I’d like it to be (I still need to update some software and tweak settings … lots of testing, meh).

I am going to be looking at some other tools and see if I can get them in portage or our multimedia overlay, which reminds me, I just added MakeMKV to there this morning if someone else wants to try it out.

6 comments on “blu-ray on gentoo

  1. jvs

    hello beandog,

    are you relying on VDPAU when it comes to decoding bluray in linux?

    greetings from austria,
    jvs

    Reply
    1. Steve

      Ah, thanks. 🙂

      I don’t have that button available on my install, but makemkvcon works fine.

      For the record: makemkvcon backup –decrypt disc:/mnt/bluray/ ./

      Reply
  2. andrew

    This is really cool, but I must admit that I cringe everytime I see the word ‘overlay,’ especially since when I searched portage for makemkv awhile back, I found that it wasn’t in there.

    Reply

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