[LINUX/MAC/WINDOWS] Blu-ray Disc support in XBMC? With menus and AACS/BD+ decryption?

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?

Quote:... 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

Hi i'm sure some are probably aware of this already - well i know of at least one xbmc dev is.

Anyway following an article I read on phoronix regarding mplayer now supporting most bluray codecs just the other day.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ne...&px=NzcwMQ

After following the link trail - It is finally looking as if there is a small growing team creating a lib for native bluray support for linux libbluray2.0, which is still active.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=150014 - thread here
http://my-trac.assembla.com/libbluray/ - project space

I had been keeping half an eye out for progress on bluray for linux but never come across this thread until now. it sounds quite promising.

It terms of XBMC they have details of their libbluray api:

http://my-trac.assembla.com/libbluray/wiki/LibApi

From what i've read it is quite early days and they still seem to be seeking developers. Would be nice to get the word around I suppose so more people with a bit of knowledge could also maybe help contribute to the development.

I'm subscribe to the changelog RSS feed and there hasn't been an update since the 25th of October. Prior to that there were multiple updates nearly every day.

Well I hope it isn't dead, mind you a forum post on the 1st november reckons it was still going then. Just have to hope it doesn't die. Hopefully the word will get about to new available developers who can help contribute, i'd love to help but think my C coding would be more of hinderance rather than help.

Hi,

I have been reading about why Bluray cannot be implemented into XBMC and the licence issue seems to the the biggest obstacle. Is there at all a way that support could be implemented for users that pay for a licence?

What are the other major issues?

Thanks,

Rob

The entity that licences the decryption keys won't licence them to open source software.

Thanks for that information. That's very interesting. Is there any workaround that could be developed like a closed source plugin that could be integrated seamlessly into the XBMC application.

At the very least could a better system of recognizing a Bluray video be implemented to make playing in external players easier. Like recognizing the BDMV folder similar to the way it deals with VIDEO_TS.

Thanks,

Rob

second is in place on linux/osx.

Even though a proprietary plugin might be possible in theory, I don't think it would ever actually happen. DRM licensing entities try very hard to prevent unauthorized access. A modular plugin that allows playback in XBMC could also be used to allow ripping by some other project.

That said, MakeMKV has made some progress on cross-platform BD decryption. It might be possible for someone to use the propretary component of MakeMKV to enable BD playback. I suspect though that if that ever happened, it would be unofficial because of GPL and DMCA concerns.