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I have some retail Blu-Ray movies with DRM that I want to watch on my Linux desktop.
I want to watch the movie directly from the disc. Tutorials I found online tell me how to rip it to a file, but I don't want to use up that much hard drive space when I will only watch the movie a few times. How can I do this?
There is no official commercial Blu-ray player for Linux. Linux users have to use open-source libraries capable of handling the DRM schemes that protect these disc contents. This is legal in most countries where interoperability allows this.
The Arch Wiki provides a very good article which explains the background, including detailed steps on how to watch Blu-ray disks with DRM.
The most comprehensive source of public VUKs available is fvonline-db.bplaced.net. Personally, I prefer to use VLC for any kind of media playback, but there are other open-source player available as well.
The law of my country (Germany) permits to make use such open-source libraries, which is also the case in the majority of foreign countries. Nevertheless, you should check if it is legal in your country to overcome DRM for the purpose of watching movies.
mpv (based on mplayer) Just Work with the necessary libraries installed. mpv.io has good keyboard controls, is fast to start up, and has good video quality (up/down scaling including for chroma, especially if you config it to use a high-quality shader-based GPU scalar, not the default VAAPI.)
Jul 18, 2022 at 23:04
I've been working with MakeMKV beta, which is a commercial (beta: shareware) converter that can play DVDs and Blu-ray discs or save them to the hard disk. It is also possible to convert existing .iso files and other video material. MakeMKV is available for many Linux DE.
When configuring my hardware, I looked up which devices are supported by them (usually older devices). So MakeMKV would rip you blue ray if it can cope with your blue ray player.
Mind that this ripping is legal in my country (Germany) but not necessarily in yours...
No matter if you rip it or you watch it directly from the Blu-ray disk, you're right, you'll need to decrypt it at least once.
VLC can come with libaacs and libbdplus, which, given the right decryption keys, can play Blu-ray with DRM.
You'll need decryption keys, which you can only buy in the shape of commercial playback software legally.
Illegal circumvention is hard and you can lock yourself out of your Blu-ray player.
