A Man and his Penguin

Yes, I got my Blu-ray drive. Recompiled Mplayer - twice! The first time didn’t work for some reason. I’m thinking of compiling it again but this time with Pulseaudio support, because I forgot to install the development libraries for PA before compiling.

It works; I can only use “mplayer” and not “gmplayer”, and the performance isn’t so great, but thank god I can play Blu-rays.

I bought three discs: Hairspray, 50 First Dates (which I haven’t seen yet) and Rush Hour 3. JB and Myer had “Buy 2, Get 1 Free” so it worked out cheaper than buying the discs from Target. Better selection in JB.

I chose those movies because they seemed the best of a bad bunch, and they were less likely to have excessive film grain. I don’t know why you’d bother watching Superman or Rocky Balboa on Blu-ray; I’ve seen those two and they look like shit because all the film grain has been left in. We didn’t buy full-HD TVs just to see the crappiness of the film stock you used, thank you very much.

Anyway, there’s another Blu-ray at JB that I’m going to get - it’s one of Hawaii. Only $18 and I bet it’s been shot with a 1080p digital video camera, so no film grain!

With all the discussion going on in the Doom9 forum I thought getting my Linux machine to work with Blu-ray would be a difficult, ultra-involved task. It was actually easy-ish - first, install the Java Runtime Environment. Second, download DumpHD and AACSkeys, and put the files from AACSkeys into the DumpHD folder. Then just tell DumpHD to rip. That’s the easy part. In order to play the ripped files you need a custom-compiled version of Mplayer because the version included with Ubuntu is too old. This is the most difficult part - you need to get shiteloads of libraries from the package manager, run ./configure –enable-gui –disable-x264 –disable-x264-lavc –codecsdir=’/usr/lib/codecs’, then make and sudo make install.

Mplayer wouldn’t successfully compile with x264 support, and for good measure I told it where to find what I assume is the w64codecs. You don’t need to compile the gui (actually the gui wouldn’t work properly with the Blu-ray files) but it’s a good idea as it provides an easy way to set the Mplayer preferences.

Once that’s done, find the biggest file in the STREAM directory of your ripped disc and tell Mplayer to play it full-screen, e.g: /usr/local/bin/mplayer -vc ffvc1 -fs 00003.m2ts

Done!

I’ll just rip Hairspray then, shall I?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 4:49 am and is filed under Backstory, Open-source application software, Proprietry software, Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.