Episode: 4298
Title: HPR4298: Playing a Blu-ray disk directly from Linux.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4298/hpr4298.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:37:21

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4298 for Wednesday the 22nd of January 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Playing a Blu-ray Disc Directly from Linux.
It is hosted by Salus Spider and is about 6 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, My Own Found Solution.
Greetings and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Peter Patterson, also known as Salus Spider.
In my spare time I like to watch sci-fi shows and movies, including those about superheroes.
I am so looking forward to the new Superman movie by DC, with James Gunn, a showrunner.
In that film, the actor Nathan Filion plays a Green Lantern named Guy Gardner.
Recently I remembered I own the Green Lantern Blu-ray animated movie, with Nathan Filion
as the voice of Hal Jordan.
That movie is called Emerald Knights.
These days, when I purchase a Blu-ray, it normally comes with a digital code for movies
anywhere.
Therefore, I often never played a physical disc at all.
This particular disc did not have that option.
I searched the streaming services for where to watch Green Lantern Emerald Knights.
As it is only available for rent or purchase, obviously since I own the disc, I am not
going to do that.
Therefore I tried once again to try and play the disc directly on my Linux system.
We do have dedicated Blu-ray players in the house.
One is a Samsung unit in our living room, but that is where my Dragon and Law Eva lives.
And another is a PlayStation 3 in our bedroom.
There is also the fact that I wanted to watch while doing other computer projects in my
own room.
My main computer system is a System76 PLEO desktop running PT Linux OS as the operating
system.
Incadvian USB is an ASIS external Blu-ray, BW-16D1H-U player.
Rather than going to detail with all that did not work, I shall instead focus on forming
you work well in my own system.
Many of the forums laid you down in very strange paths.
I all came down to installing all I need from flat back via flathab.org.
He does all that I installed.
VLC, make MKV, the Blu-ray Java plugin, the SDK AAC encoding plugin, the make MKV
plugin for VLC.
Detailed program names are in the show notes.
To install these direct from terminal, you would type flat back install the name of
the program.
These instructions assume they already have flat back installed on your Linux system.
If you do not, then a flathab website will give you guidance for your particular distro.
I did have to install VLC first from PC Linux OS, which had been installed from the repo.
This enabled all the relevant library files to be accessible across flat back.
Make MKV is a format converter or transcoder that converts the files on a physical disk
to MKV files.
Many use this program to copy the Blu-rays to a storage medium for their own home streaming
purposes.
I have yet to go down that road, as if this wanted to play the disk, plus I don't have
that much storage.
I originally purchased MKV for $50 in 2020, yes paid.
It is a proprietary program, but then again so is the Blu-ray disk encryption.
These days it costs $60 per lifetime license.
That said, make MKV is beta software that is free to use and a supplier license key that
is good for a month.
The only downside is you have to visit their forum page every month to obtain the updated
key code.
Once this all this was installed, I opened VLC, clicked an open disk from media, selected
Blu-ray from this selection, they clicked on play.
For me it just worked.
Hope it shall do for you also.
It is so great to be able to directly play Blu-rays on my Linux system again.
Remember the green lantern of, and brightest day, and black is night.
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil's might beware my power, green lantern's light.
Thank you so much for listening to my latest topic of interest.
Please leave me a comment on the HBR show page.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Now go forth, take care of yourself, also your fellow neighbors, and record your own HBR show.
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On the Sadois status, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
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