Want to Watch Blu-rays in VLC on Ubuntu? You NEED MakeMKV
I picked up a cheap external USB Blu-ray drive recently with the aim of watching my Doctor Who ‘The Collection’ Blu-rays — WhoRays, if you will— in bed, on my laptop1 (which runs Ubuntu, obviously).
Thing is you can’t just stick in an official Blu-ray disc and watch what’s on it, not in Linux, not on macOS, and not even on Windows. You need additional software, usually paid, that provides the license required to ‘decrypt’ Blu-ray content and throughput it to yo’ eyes.
Truth be told: Blu-ray is awkward, it’s obtuse and, to my mind, it’s a text-book example of how not to design a media format.
However, I did manage to get everything working — smoothly — and I didn’t have to pay for anything.
I figured I’d pass on the knowledge so that anyone else out there who wants to watch Blu-rays in Ubuntu (or on another Ubuntu-based Linux distro) can follow my steps to satisfy their content-craving.
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MakeMKV is proprietary, paid-for software — and it’s at this point some of you will nope-out. Personally, I reason that BluRay is a proprietary format to start with, and since I already use lots of closed-source software for entertainment purposes, e.g., Steam, Netflix, Spotify, etc… Why not!?
But while MakeKMKV is technically software you have to buy all of its features (including the stuff that lets you play BluRays WITH menus in VLC) is “free” while the app is in beta.