An interesting post came up the other day on the Gentoo forums about how to rip Blu-Ray discs on Linux. Short summary: I have no idea if it’s possible, and the original poster is still investigating. It has gotten me thinking though. The Blu-Ray player that I want to get it is $600, and it looks like it’s being phased out of production anyway, so why not get a disc drive instead and rip the movies? It’d save me some money, and I’d eventually buy one anyway.
Well, the questions that come to mind are, will the software actually work, will the drive firmware let me do that, and am I going to have to use Windows?
I haven’t done any research at all, mostly because I can’t afford to buy a DVD drive right now, but the whole thing does have me curious. I always assumed there was no way to rip the stuff under Linux, but I haven’t gone looking for possible solutions either. The only thing I am sure about though, is that once ripped, you can play the content just fine. At least, I think so. I’m not positive about the HD audio codecs, pretty sure about the video ones though.
I tend to buy hardware first and figure out how to get it working second, but because the DRM is so finicky in this case, I really don’t want to take that approach and be out a couple hundred bucks. In the meantime, I really wish I could at least demo the stuff at home. That would be cool. The only 1080p content I’ve seen so far is the movie trailers I’ve downloaded from Apple’s website. I gotta say that stuff looks pretty good.
I just got my ps3 to play blu-ray and dvd’s. It has a good upscaler for dvd and plays blu-ray without problems so far. You can even share your movies (1080p) via ushare. And best of all maybe is you can get it to run gentoo 😉
The Ubuntu people have figured it out, although it’s a little clunky:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD
The latest version of mplayer should be able to decode the hi-def audio codecs, but I still think you need a beefy system to play the AVC encoded stuff at a reasonable rate.
As soon as it’s possible to play HD DVD and Blu-ray discs in Linux natively with full support for menus and the like, that will be the day when I switch my media PC from Windows to a Linux based box. That is the only thing really stopping me from switching, as it takes me about 2 hours to rip a 25 GB HD DVD on this system, which is just too slow for my tastes. That, plus then I have to deal with the lack of storage issue (don’t have enough capacity to store my entire collection without re-encoding it to something smaller, which would then take up even more time).
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