Granted this was done on Ubuntu 22.04, most of the steps will work on other distros as well.
Blu-ray players and discs are becoming more popular because of better video resolution of the media, but also the price drops in the hardware.
A few years ago, I bought an LG M-DISC Blu-ray player for a desktop system. The player, which can read and write, is SATA. Some of my other systems are laptops and I wanted my Blu-ray drive to be more portable for use by other systems.
External Case
I purchased a ‘NexStar DX2’ which is a USB 3.0 external enclosure for a SATA Blu-ray/DVD/C drive. The box supports SATA III devices and works on Linux,Windows and Macs. Of course the box does not say Linux, but I’ve had no issues so far (minus the usual, but we’ll get into that in a bit). Better specs of the enclosure can be found here. The drive itself can be found here, but you can use other Blu-ray devices.
The case is aluminum and just requires you to put the drive in, connect the cables and screw the cover back on the case. There are little rubber feet to stick on the bottom as well. The USB connection is a cable that has USB-A on one side and the other is a USB-B connector, it is a printer cable.
Connect the USB cable and also the power adapter. The device cannot draw enough power through the USB connection, so it needs the AC adapter.
Turning It On
When the Blu-ray drive is powered up, there isn’t anything major to see until you put a disc into the drive.
You can run the ‘lsblk’ command to see that the drive is present:
The above command will list the model number of the device as well as some other details (name, model number, serial number and state). If needed, you can ‘grep’ out just ‘sr0’, or whatever the Blu-ray device name will be.
Nothing really happens until a disc is placed into it.
Inserting a Disc
Once a Blu-ray or DVD disc is inserted, the disc label is retrieved. The disk is mounted at ‘/media/$USER/<label>’.
An audio CD is mounted on the device name, for example mine is ‘sr0’ since I have not other optical drive on this system.
But will a Blu-ray or DVD play with VLC, or another player? Not yet. If you try, you should get a message similar to Figure 1.
FIGURE 1
Advanced Access Content System (AACS)
Some Blu-ray and DVDs can be encrypted. In this manner, your system cannot play them. Right now, you have an overpriced audio player to play music CDs.
So, how to we get the encryption part managed?
For now, go to the site ‘https://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/’, or its mirror site at ‘https://vlc-aacs.whoknowsmy.name/’. At this site are two files, for Windows and Macs, while one is installed by the Linux repository.
Let’s look at the file in the Linux repository first. It is named ‘libaacs’ or ‘libaacs0’ and is the AACS Dynamic Library. So, use your appropriate installation command, which on Ubuntu it is:
On most systems, the ‘libaacs0’ is already installed, but this file is not enough to decrypt the Blu-ray and DVDs. You can also install ‘libbluray2 libbluray-bdj’ while you are at it.
The second file is the ‘Keys Database’. Download it from the site mentioned above, extract the file, rename it to ‘KEYDB.dfg’ and place it in ‘~/.config/aacs/’. The file you are downloading is the ‘keydb.cfg’, just select the one for you appropriate language. For english, my mine is at ‘http://fvonline-db.bplaced.net/fv_download.php?lang=eng’.
If you by chance installed VLC with SNAP, then the ‘keydb.cfg’ needs to go into ‘~/snap/vlc/current/.config/aacs/’. It may not hurt to also place it in the other folder, ‘~/.config/aacs’, for other programs that may need it.
NOTE: If the folders do not exist, create them.
There is another compressed file you will need from ‘https://forum.doom9.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=13985&d=1390515451’. Extract the folder in the compressed file to ‘~/.config/bdplus/’. It should extract a folder named ‘vm0’.
When starting the movie, you need to select to not use the menus, like in Figure 2.
FIGURE 2
Conclusion
This seems a round-about way just to get a Blu-ray to work, but Blu-ray videos offer better viewing with a higher resolution.
Be sure that you have a monitor or display that supports high-definition (HD) or you may have some issues with the video.
Blu-ray players and discs are becoming more popular because of better video resolution of the media, but also the price drops in the hardware.
A few years ago, I bought an LG M-DISC Blu-ray player for a desktop system. The player, which can read and write, is SATA. Some of my other systems are laptops and I wanted my Blu-ray drive to be more portable for use by other systems.
External Case
I purchased a ‘NexStar DX2’ which is a USB 3.0 external enclosure for a SATA Blu-ray/DVD/C drive. The box supports SATA III devices and works on Linux,Windows and Macs. Of course the box does not say Linux, but I’ve had no issues so far (minus the usual, but we’ll get into that in a bit). Better specs of the enclosure can be found here. The drive itself can be found here, but you can use other Blu-ray devices.
The case is aluminum and just requires you to put the drive in, connect the cables and screw the cover back on the case. There are little rubber feet to stick on the bottom as well. The USB connection is a cable that has USB-A on one side and the other is a USB-B connector, it is a printer cable.
Connect the USB cable and also the power adapter. The device cannot draw enough power through the USB connection, so it needs the AC adapter.
Turning It On
When the Blu-ray drive is powered up, there isn’t anything major to see until you put a disc into the drive.
You can run the ‘lsblk’ command to see that the drive is present:
Code:
lsblk -o NAME,MODEL,SERIAL,SIZE,STATE -dThe above command will list the model number of the device as well as some other details (name, model number, serial number and state). If needed, you can ‘grep’ out just ‘sr0’, or whatever the Blu-ray device name will be.
Nothing really happens until a disc is placed into it.
Inserting a Disc
Once a Blu-ray or DVD disc is inserted, the disc label is retrieved. The disk is mounted at ‘/media/$USER/<label>’.
An audio CD is mounted on the device name, for example mine is ‘sr0’ since I have not other optical drive on this system.
But will a Blu-ray or DVD play with VLC, or another player? Not yet. If you try, you should get a message similar to Figure 1.
FIGURE 1
Advanced Access Content System (AACS)
Some Blu-ray and DVDs can be encrypted. In this manner, your system cannot play them. Right now, you have an overpriced audio player to play music CDs.
So, how to we get the encryption part managed?
For now, go to the site ‘https://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/’, or its mirror site at ‘https://vlc-aacs.whoknowsmy.name/’. At this site are two files, for Windows and Macs, while one is installed by the Linux repository.
Let’s look at the file in the Linux repository first. It is named ‘libaacs’ or ‘libaacs0’ and is the AACS Dynamic Library. So, use your appropriate installation command, which on Ubuntu it is:
Code:
sudo apt install libaacs0On most systems, the ‘libaacs0’ is already installed, but this file is not enough to decrypt the Blu-ray and DVDs. You can also install ‘libbluray2 libbluray-bdj’ while you are at it.
The second file is the ‘Keys Database’. Download it from the site mentioned above, extract the file, rename it to ‘KEYDB.dfg’ and place it in ‘~/.config/aacs/’. The file you are downloading is the ‘keydb.cfg’, just select the one for you appropriate language. For english, my mine is at ‘http://fvonline-db.bplaced.net/fv_download.php?lang=eng’.
If you by chance installed VLC with SNAP, then the ‘keydb.cfg’ needs to go into ‘~/snap/vlc/current/.config/aacs/’. It may not hurt to also place it in the other folder, ‘~/.config/aacs’, for other programs that may need it.
NOTE: If the folders do not exist, create them.
There is another compressed file you will need from ‘https://forum.doom9.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=13985&d=1390515451’. Extract the folder in the compressed file to ‘~/.config/bdplus/’. It should extract a folder named ‘vm0’.
When starting the movie, you need to select to not use the menus, like in Figure 2.
FIGURE 2
Conclusion
This seems a round-about way just to get a Blu-ray to work, but Blu-ray videos offer better viewing with a higher resolution.
Be sure that you have a monitor or display that supports high-definition (HD) or you may have some issues with the video.
