Play Blu-ray Movies on Raspberry Pi via XBMC

Play video on Raspberry Pi is quite easy what you need is a media player such as XBMC, which is a great media center interface that works on many platforms including the Raspberry Pi. This post will show you how to download and install XBMC on Raspberry Pi and viewing Blu-ray disc on Raspberry Pi via XBMC.

Download and install XBMC on Raspberry Pi

There is three variants of XBMC: OpenELEC and Raspbmc. Here, we will describe how to install XBMC on Raspbmc. It's a very simple process. First of all fire up terminal:

Install chmod

Now we need to run the installation script with sudo privileges.

Install sudo

You will then be greeted with a screen similar to the one below. You are now using the installer. Simply follow the instructions and you should be fine.

Install XBMC on Raspberry Pi

Play Blu-ray on Raspberry Pi via XBMC

Unfortunately, Blu-ray discs aren't supported by default XBMC. The following part will show you 2 ways to enable Blu-ray playback via XBMC on Raspberry Pi.

Solution 1: Play Blu-ray on XBMC via MakeMKV
Solution 2: Rip Blu-ray for XBMC playback

Solution 1: Play Blu-ray on XBMC via MakeMKV

MakeMKV does coupled with an XBMC plug-in that can give you a pretty close experience of viewing Blu-ray movies on XBMC on Windows or Linux. Here we will describe the step of setting up all on Windows platform.

Step 1: Install MakeMKV

Download the installation package from MakeMKV's web site and install it as you would any other program on Windows platform.

Step 2: Install and tweak Blu-ray plugin for XBMC

Download the zip file linked on that page and install it to XBMC's video plugins folder, it's most likely in , which you can access by going to your home folder, showing hidden files (by going to View > Show Hidden Files) and double-clicking on the folder.

On Windows, it will either be in your AppData folder (C:\Users\Whitson Gordon\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\plugins\video), where Whitson Gordon is your usename or XBMC's program folder (wherever you installed XBMC, most likely (C:\Program Files\XBMC\plugins\video)

After extracting the BluRay folder to this location, you may have to tweak a few other settings. First disable User Account Control by hitting the Start Menu and typing "User Account Control" into the search box. Click on "Change User Account Control Settings" and drag the slider down to "Never Notify". If you're watching Blu-rays at your computer screen with a mouse and keyboard, this step isn't necessary, but if you're using a remote control, you'll need to disable this so you don't get a popup every time you try to play a disc. (Make sure you know the risks of disabling Account Control settings.)

Now open up XBMC and go to your video plugins menu. Its location will differ on every skin, but on the default skin it will be under Video > Video Plugins > BluRay. go to the bottom of the menu and choose Settings. Hit MakeMKV location and find your makemkvcon.exe file on your system - it'll be where you installed MakeMKV (C:\Program Files\MakeMKV\makemkvcon.exe) by default. Hit OK.

Step 3: Play your disc.

Now, whenever you want to play a Blu-ray disc, just go back to your Video Plugins in XBMC, hit BluRay, and choose Play Disc at the top of the menu (Videos > Plugins > BluRay > Play Disc).

Original source:
https://lifehacker.com/5621471/how-to-enable-blu-ray-playback-in-xbmc

Solution 2: Rip Blu-ray for XBMC playback

The process of watching Blu-ray on XBMC with MakeMKV plug-in may seems too complicated especially for some beginners. The good news is that there are some simple to use Blu-ray Ripper application can assist you to rip Blu-ray to XBMC playable digital file formats with just few clicks.

Here, you can get the job easily done by downloading Pavtube ByteCopy, which not only helps to bypass the Blu-ray copy protection on-the-fly, but also direct rip or convert Blu-ray to XBMC readable digital file formats on the same interface.

For Mac users, you can switch to download Pavtube ByteCopy for Mac to perform the conversion on macOS High Sierra, macOS Sierra, Mac OS X El Capitan, Mac OS X Yosemite, etc.

Step by Step to Rip Blu-ray for XBMC Playing on Raspberry Pi

Step 1: Load Blu-ray disc.

Click "File" and "Load from disc" to load your Blu-ray movies to ByteCopy. Don't forget to select preferred subtitles and audio track on the main menu.

Load Blu-ray disc

Step 2. Choose your target output video format.

Click the dropdown format menu to choose your target video format where there are quite a lot of output video formats option . And here we need to choose "HD Video-H.264 HD Video (*.mp4)" for playing via XBMC on Raspberry Pi.

Output Raspberry Pi supported file format

Step 3. Profile settings adjustment (Optional).

If you want to change the default profile settings, please click "Settings" to adjust both video and audio settings according to your need. Here you are allowed to set video size, bitrate, frame rate, etc to achieve the best movie effect on your tablet.