View Full Version : [LINUX/MAC/WINDOWS] Blu-ray playback support in XBMC? Menus and AACS/BD+ decryption?
SneakerElph
2008-03-01, 22:04
With HD-DVD having lost the format war, and BD-ROM drives becoming available for PC's, is there any chance we could get support from XBMC?
As far as i know, the DRM on Blu-Ray has been gotten around. If I'm correct we know the keys to decrypt it, and any new movies with newer keys could be easily gotten from a PC-based blu-ray playing software.
So, we have current keys, and maybe there could be an auto update feature for new keys to be downloaded to XBMC?
Maybe all of this is illegal, i'm not sure. could someone shed some light on this? I'm going to be building a HTPC for XBMC and want to know if getting a Blu-Ray drive would be a good idea.
rodalpho
2008-03-01, 22:18
It is technically illegal under the DMCA in the USA, yes.
The DRM has been bypassed, but as far as I know there is no seamless way to play HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray disks on linux at all-- yet. You have to rip them to hard disk and strip the DRM first. At that point XBMC can play them.
Once the files are dumped to HDD you end up with a bunch of BIG .EVO files and support files. The .EVO are containers with either H.264 or VC-1 video and a myriad of sound tracks inside. So far as I know nothing has been created to just play this other than one or two somewhat crappy and certainly expensive programs for the PC. As it stands now Ubuntu out of the box cannot even read the ODF2.5 format for these disks and must be patched. Hopefully the newest one will, it's in testing now.
Transcoding (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1107211) is your best option unless you want 20+gigs worth of files for EACH movie around, never mind the grief of trying to find software to play them. Just doing this under Ubuntu is a PITA (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD)
So, as if they didn't already have enough work you're asking the devs to do something no one else has yet to do on Linux - create HD-DVDShrink for Linux. I personally think it would be great too but they've got enough to do and transcoded files play great if you're willing to put some effort into it. for now I think you're stuck doing it yourself, eventually someone will write something to do it for you. They will then like be sued into the ground or harrassed to death like all of the authors of the previous one button push apps done for DVDs <sigh>
Any form of key distribution or the like is certainly not very legal.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if we will see support for the evo container in the distant future, who knows though. MPlayer have support for it today, only unencrypted media of course.
Gamester17
2008-03-02, 13:55
We will let you discuss this here as long as you do not discuss anything illegal. You may only discuss playback of Blu-ray under Linux with open source software as a general topic, meaning not specific to XBMC, the discussion here should be just as well pointed to MPlayer, VLC, Xine, or a other open source video-player for Linux, (I say Linux because if we can get it working on Linux first then it can be ported to Mac OS X and Windows operating-systems later).
For encrypted Blu-ray playback some other third-party project/programmers would have to write an open source 'DeDRM' library capable of AACS decryption and BD+ decryption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#Digital_rights_management_.28DRM.29) on-the-fly (which are the Digital Rights Management (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_Management) schemes that Blu-ray uses), similar to how XBMC today use DeCSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS) to decrypt CSS (Content-Scrambling System) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System) encrypted DVD-Video movies. Team-XBMC will not develop a such library from scratch.
NOTE! Finally, there will be no discussion about key-sharing/distribution in these forums!
PS! For unencrypted Blu-ray playback go lobby the FFmpeg project (as XBMC uses FFmpeg (http://www.ffmpeg.org)'s open source video/audio decoders and container demuxers), see:
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Codec_and_Format_requests
Any form of key distribution or the like is certainly not very legal.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if we will see support for the evo container in the distant future, who knows though. MPlayer have support for it today, only unencrypted media of course.
I think if you follow the link I left about restricted media there was a player mentioned, mPlayer?, that worked on unencrypted media as EVO I believe. I'm transcoding though, and just ordered a $%%&#$% BR drive <grumble>
Just to satisfy my curiosity I added the m2ts and evo extensions to videoextensions in advancedsettings.xml and both works. ;) Not perfectly, but hey, this is as unsupported as unsupported gets as far as XBMC is concerned.
I know XBMC doesn't support it but I'm wondering whether something like PowerDVD works under Linux and supports bluray / hd dvd playback.
What would be great is if there was some sort of plugin that would initiate the app load within xbmc
icekiller
2008-07-07, 15:16
no there isn't any program able to let you view hd or bluray movies.
you can however rip it in linux and convert it (remove the encryption) and watch it.. but i believe its illegal in most countries..
I believe you will find that you cannot decrypt the latest stuff in Linux, BD+ in particular. Slysoft has that cornered I believe.
ethanmcdonald
2008-08-25, 23:34
So any chance XBMC under Linux/OSX/WinPC will be able to detect a Blu-ray/HD-DVD disc and launch an assigned external player application like it did for the Dongle Free DVD player on the XBox? ???
Gamester17
2008-08-26, 16:42
So any chance XBMC under Linux/OSX/WinPC will be able to detect a Blu-ray/HD-DVD disc and launch an assigned external player application like it did for the Dongle Free DVD player on the XBox? ???Please submit a new feature request ticket on trac for that, see http://xbmc.org/trac
eaglemmoomin
2009-02-15, 16:48
I thought Arcsoft provided a plugin for TMT as that will play Bluerays and HDDVDs so in conjuction with a certain Slysoft tool would this be possible or even legal to do? Mind you its not exactly a cheap solution and effectively means it would only work on an MS operating system.
Actually there is an java based ripper for BD+.
But I don't now how well its working, maybe someone with a BD drive can try it?
... the open source community managed to catch up and the tools can now handle discs up to about October 08. The latest DumpHD even does BD+ removal on the fly (and the thread contains some very useful instructions on its use - I haven't quite forgotten how to write a guide). However, the guys at Macrovision haven't been sitting idly by and managed to score a temporary victory with the release of the latest batch of titles starting at the end of October / start of November. Oh, open source BD+ removal was only made possible by the discovery of new processing keys. ...
from http://www.doom9.org/ News from 31 December 2008