It still took me several tries to play a disc in VLC, though. So once again their instructions are very good, I can't improve them: I plan to update this post in February '19, after the current key expires, to see if the lib still works or no. But I think the necessary libs are now installed and can be used by VLC without it. Well, honestly I don't know if we'll need that key or not-I'd already installed it before I discovered the program no longer had streaming. If you plan to use the program to rip a BD to MKV files you'll need a registration key:īut that isn't what we want to do, is it? We want to play the disc. Anyway the good news is that they give very simple, basic, concise step-by-step instructions that I can't improve upon:

Each month they update the beta registration key and you must renew it, but more on that later.

Yes, compile it from source! It's a proprietary program but 'free while in beta', which it has been for years now. So first you need to compile and install MakeMKV. To play a DVD you normally want the 'no menu' box unchecked, for BD you want to check it. Apparently they did this because they came up with a better solution, namely a method of allowing VLC to directly use their library files to open BDs in much the same manner as it does DVDs, that is, Media>Open Disc>Blu-Ray. But that hardly matters now MakeMKV removed the streaming function. It involved installing a proprietary ripper program called MakeMKV and using it to decode the BD and then stream the result to either VLC or Kodi for playback, which sounds overly complicated (the article called it 'clunky'. What I did find through Google searches was both Ubuntu-based and out-of-date. The Debian Wiki covers the problem with DVDs rather thoroughly:īut information on playing Blu-Ray discs was harder to find, thus this Howto. Due to legal and licensing restrictions, Debian cannot play most commercial DVDs and Blu-ray discs out-of-the-box.

Install makemkv ubuntu for free