HPR4298: Playing a Blu-ray disk directly from Linux.

Greetings and welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Peter Paterson, also known as SolusSpider. In my spare time I like to watch scifi shows and movies, including those about superheroes. I am so looking forward to the new Superman movie by DC, with James Gunn as showrunner. In that film the actor Nathan Fillion plays a Green Lantern named Guy Gardner. Recently I remembered that I owned a Green Lantern Blu-ray animated movie with Nathan Fillion as the voice of Hal Jordan. That movie is named Emerald Knights. These days when I purchase a Blu-ray it normally comes with a digital code for Movies Anywhere . Therefore I often never play the physical disk at all. This particular disk did not have that option. I searched the streaming services for where to watch Green Lantern: Emerald Knights. Seems it is only available for rent or purchase. Obviously since I own the disk I am not going to do that. Therefore, I tried once again to try to play the disk directly on my Linux system. We do have dedicated Blu-ray players in the house. One is a Samsung unit in our living room, but that is where my Dragon-in-Law Eva lives. The other is a Playstation 3 in our bedroom. There is also the factor that I wanted to watch while doing other computer projects in my own room. My main computer system is a System76 Thelio desktop running PCLinuxOS as the operating system. Connected via USB is an Asus External Blu-Ray BW-16D1H-U player . Rather than go into detail with all that did not work, I shall instead focus on informing you what worked well on my own system. Many of the forums lead you down strange paths. It all came down to installing all I needed from Flatpak via Flathub.org Here is all that I installed: VLC : org.videolan.VLC MakeMKV : com.makemkv.MakeMKV Blu-ray java plugin : org.videolan.VLC.Plugin.bdj FDK-AAC encoding plugin : org.videolan.VLC.Plugin.fdkaac MakeMKV plugin for VLC : org.videolan.VLC.Plugin.makemkv Detailed program names are in the shownotes. To install these direct from terminal type: flatpak install (name of program) These instructions assume that you already have Flatpak installed on your Linux system. If you do not, then the Flathub website will give you guidance for your particular distro. I did have to uninstall VLC first from PCLinuxOS, which had been installed from the repo. This enabled all the relevant library files to be accessible across Flatpak. MakeMKV is a format converter, or transcoder, that converts the files on a physical disk to MKV files. Many use this program to copy their Blu-Rays to a storage medium for their own home-streaming purposes. I have yet to go down that road, as I just wanted to play the disk. Plus I don't have that much storage. I originally purchased MakeMKV for $50 in 2020. Yes, paid. It is a proprietary program, but then again so is the Blu-Ray disk encryption. These days it costs $60 for a lifetime lice