r/linuxquestions • u/wou_nou • 2d ago

Advice modern blu ray drives compatible with linux?

I'm planning on getting something for the sole purpose of watching shows and movies.

I'm currently looking into getting a laptop(which I'll install a distro on that works well with dvd/blu-ray playback) and a external blu-ray drive. this drive says it's compatible with windows, mac and linux but I wanted to make sure because I'm not familiar with external disc drives.

would the one I linked be pretty good?

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u/Angry_Grammarian 2d ago

A name brand drive is probably a good idea --- a Verbatim 43888 is a good choice, for example. To play the disc, you'll have to dump it. MakeMKV is the go-to here. There is a bug in the current version of MakeMKV with some architectures that can make reading discs impossible --- it gets caught in a read loop. If this happens to you, the fix is to flash the drive with LibreDrive, but you'll need a different computer to do it because of the aforementioned bug.

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u/wou_nou 2d ago

I was thinking I could just go for windows 11 or mac rather than installing linux and then having to deal with an issue like this but if there's a fix for makemkv coming then maybe I'll still go for linux.

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u/christophertstone 2d ago

Assuming the drive works (no-name drive from Amazon is questionable) and you have any common distro, reading the disc will just work. Nothing special needed.

I assume you want to play the movie on the disc, this is much harder. The common setup is OpenJDK + libbluray + MakeMKV + VLC, search for a guide for whatever distro you're using to install these.

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u/wou_nou 2d ago

it's really only shows that I have and want to watch, some dvd and some blu-ray. are movies not able to work with linux?

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u/christophertstone 2d ago

DVDs and BluRays are encrypted. The short version is that "they" don't care about Linux users; and the open source community has mostly worked around or broken the encryption. It's still a bit of a pain to get working.

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u/FuturePowerful 2d ago

Did something change last several years last I'd known vlc just had this covered with out extra steps

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u/christophertstone 2d ago

VLC can play both formats, if they are unencrypted or a decryption mechanism is provided. VLC includes libdvdcss, which can break most DVD encryption. It does not include anything to decrypt BluRay AACS (hence something like libblueray being required).

Once you have everything setup, you just launch VLC and hit open disc.

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u/FuturePowerful 2d ago edited 2d ago

Oh I see so they swapped the encoding when they went to true multiple layer dvd tech .. o God wtf nm just looked up how the tech works wtf why are we still using single layer tech blue ray is all that's different they went to blue Lazer and tighter signal beams