Linux friendly Blu Ray drive

[BicyclerBoy]

The place to find/discuss this sort of info is doom9 or videolan poss..

I believe the current "good" players are a well kept secret.
This is to protect the player's firmware for as long as possible.
As long as someone has one & feeds the keyDB you're okay with any player.

I suspect one of the current LG players can be flashed with one of the previous "good" player's f/w. Again, go to the source.

The LG drives can be reflashed with linux flash tool. This tool can extract f/w from drive & the firmware update files..

If you don't have hacked firmware you must keep the f/w updated from manufacturer. When f/w updates stop the BD drive becomes a brick/doorstop/DVD-drive. And you have to find alternative ways to get VUKs etc.

If you pay for makeMKV or AnyDVD you should be fine until the drive gets revoked.
BD players are disposable by design.
BD+ could be a whole new ball-game..

[nderic77]

Quick follow-up questions: do all blu-ray players become obsolete for new movies over time? In other words, does an old ps3 no longer play the latest bd movies?

If I actually find an external blu-ray player for my laptop which works with Ubuntu, will it only play certain movies?

[gordintoronto]

The folks at Tekzilla say the PS3 is the best BD player, because it gets frequent firmware updates. It seems that Hollywood frequently adds new content protection schemes, and old firmware can't play those discs.

[Graham C Williams]

Just watched '5th Element' on Blu-ray. Ubuntu 12.04 64bit, VLC.
LG player:
description: DVD-RAM writer
product: BDDVDRW CH10LS20
vendor: HL-DT-ST
physical id: 2
bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0

[ariel]

Pretty hard to find a BD player / writer for Linux...

I guess some of the players are Linux compatible, but it's not written on the box.

Any recommendation of a BD (R/W) brand / model that works on a recent Ubuntu? [ internal preferred, external ok ]

( and an easy way to change the regcod would be a + )

FWIW, I have been using an LG WH10LS30 bluray drive for reading/writing BDs for a while in my ubuntu desktop.

I use blu-rays only to burn data backups, not movies. I've burnt very many 25gb disks with no problems. In order to get K3b to burn & verify blurays though, I had to install the cdrecord utilities and get "k3b" to discover cdrecord, running k3b's automatic setup (otherwise, K3b would only produce coasters) - I followed the instructions referenced in post #7 here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2047399.
I have used both BD-R and BD-RE media for backups. I haven't tried any dual-layer (50gb) disk but this drive is supposed to work with them.
I try and avoid what they call "LTH" BD-R disks (which are usually the cheapest)