This HOWTO will probably work in Debian Squeeze, but the system I used was running Wheezy. Hopefully this HOWTO won’t be necessary long, but until then, it’s a very good way to watch blurays on your Linux system. This will also work for Mac and Windows, with some changes, but this is strictly a Debian Testing HOWTO.
There are various ways to do what we need to do. Some require you to rip the bluray first and then watch the resulting MKV. I found that this took 15 minutes or so on my 8-core system. However, there is another method which uses a program called makemkv and pipes the output to VLC using a network stream. I found this method on the web but found that some of the links were screwed up, so I couldn’t use it directly. After some searching, I found the script I was looking for and edited it slightly. For your convenience, I’m rewriting the HOWTO and including the files all here.
First of all, create a folder called makemkv in your home directory. You can use a different location if you prefer but for simplicity we’ll put it in our home directory.
mkdir ~/makemkv |
Change into that directory and grab two zipped tarballs from the makemkv author. Then extract them.
cd ~/makemkv wget http://www.makemkv.com/download/makemkv_v1.7.2_bin.tar.gz wget http://www.makemkv.com/download/makemkv_v1.7.2_oss.tar.gz tar xvf makemkv_v1.7.2_bin.tar.gz tar xvf makemkv_v1.7.2_oss.tar.gz |
Yes you need both the bin and the src.
Make sure you have some dependencies.
sudo apt-get install build-essential libc6-dev libssl-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libqt4-dev curl vlc |
In other HOWTOs, the curl dependency isn’t mentioned. You need curl for the script we will download later.
Next compile and installed the two packages.
cd makemkv_v1.6.12_oss make -f makefile.linux sudo make -f makefile.linux install cd ../makemkv_v1.6.12_bin make -f makefile.linux sudo make -f makefile.linux install |
Finally download and run playBluRay.sh. I gzipped it so the site wouldn’t complain about the file type. Just gunzip it and execute it.
It will run makemkvcon to decrypt the bluray and setup a stream on port 51000 of your computer. Then it will start vlc using the network stream. It may take a few moments to load it all.
Note that sometimes a bluray won’t play correctly even with this method or you may see a behind the scenes segment before the movie. I had this problem on my Rambo bluray.