HowTo: Use lxbdplayer – the Open Source Blu-Ray Disc player for Linux
Yes, you read that right – there is finally an Open Source Blu-Ray Disc player GUI for Linux, albeit unofficial and certainly very grey in legality depending on which country you are in.
lxbdplayer is the collaborative effort of four French Engineering students. What they have written is basically a frontend that combines the apps DumpHD and AACSKeys which I have used in previous Blu-Ray articles into one easy to use GUI. Decrypted BD streams are then piped into MPlayer for playback.
The end result is that you can now watch your BD movies almost as simply as a regular video player without the need to go through the process of ripping them into an MKV file first, or chewing up loads of drive space.
Now before you get all excited, this is a work in progress and you are ultimately limited to the decryption keys that have been discovered so far. You have no better ability to watch BD titles than you have with doing it all manually with DumpHD and AACSKeys. In fact, lxbdplayer already falls over in one area (for now), and that is it has no ability to process BD+ protected discs. Attempting to watch such movies will show a partially or fully corrupted video stream.
I tried using lxbdplayer with several of my BD titles under Ubuntu 10.04, and found that it played all my older titles pretty much perfectly. It’s only newer titles, especially those featuring BD+ protection that are problematic.
In short, this tool will only let you play older BD titles easily, but no doubt as DumpHD and AACSKeys progress in development, we will see those improvements filter down to lxbdplayer. I should also point out that lxbdplayer does not actually play the disc as such – it pulls out the titles available on the disc and allows you to play them by choosing them from a menu. It will not actually allow you to play the menu interfaces provided on the disc.
Your BD optical drive will also need to have been hacked with custom firmware to ignore the Player certificate, or use an imported BD drive that already ignores the Player certificates, or AACSKeys will not be able to retrieve the decryption key to decrypt the disc with.
Anyway, to use lxbdplayer, you will need to download the following:
- The lxbdplayer itself. This package is a .deb for Ubuntu and Debian.
- The AACSKeys plugin for lxbdplayer.
- The MakeMKV package (this is the 64-bit version. To get the 32-bit version, click here).
- The ShowKeys library (again, this is the 64-bit version. To get the 32-bit version, click here).
- Install the packages by either double-clicking on them and let the GDebi installer install them, or use a terminal as follows:
$ sudo dpkg -i lxbdplayer_0.2.1_all.deb lxbdaacs_0.2.1_all.deb makemkv_1.5.5b_amd64.deb libshowkeys_v1.5.5_amd64.deb - A couple of dependencies will need to be downloaded, but otherwise the installation is small and quick.
. - Once the install is complete, import the decryption keys needed by typing in the following command (you do not need to use sudo here):
$ bdkey-install - Now you are ready to rock and/or roll.
. - Insert your BD movie disc into your BD drive. Within seconds you should be prompted by Gnome about what to do with the disc, and you will notice that there is a new default action for BD discs to launch lxbdplayer. Go ahead and allow lxbdplayer to launch, or alternatively launch it manually from Applications->Sound & Video->lxBDPlayer. If you manually launch, you need to tell the player where your BD title is mounted. Under Ubuntu Lucid, this will be under the /media directory.
. - Once your BD disc is located, lxbdplayer will process the disc for a short while before presenting you with a chapter list. To play a title, simply choose it from the list and hit the Play button. Almost right away you will see the video appear on your screen.
The player showing the video itself is simply MPlayer, and all its standard controls apply here.
Pat yourself on the back – and enjoy your movies. 
More information about lxbdplayer including screenshots, can be found on the project’s home page, but be warned, it’s all in French.
Hi there i have everything here i just dont know where to add the showkeys.so if you could give me a guid it would be very nice and i also have a movie that has a cps key of 40 instead of 32. but if you should show me where the showkeys.so goes would be very much obbligato.
You just install the showkeys library. You don’t need to place it anywhere. The deb installer does that for you.
I haven’t been able to find a firmware patch for my drive, but I thought I’d give this a shot anyway.
I tried playing a movie. It opened the titles and chapters fine in lxbdplayer. But when I selected a title and pressed “play”, the lxbdplayer screen disappeared for a second and then came back again. Nothing played. So I tried running it from the terminal. When I browse to the Blu-Ray disc and try to open it, the following error is returned in the terminal:
Charging plugin … AACSDecrypt (based on DumpHD) : original author KenD00DumpHD (Mod) 0.01 Beta Original Author : KenD00
Opening Key Data File… FAILED
Key Data File not found
Would this be because my firmware hasn’t been patched? Or is there something else I’m missing?
Thanks!
Pablo.
No idea – you’re using an app I’m not familiar with (AACSDecrypt). Check the software’s pre-requisites.
If you haven’t patched your drive’s firmware, then don’t expect to get anywhere anyway – the player certificate used by AACSKeys and DumpHD was revoked a loooong time ago. This is why you need to patch your drive to get around that.
I want to buy a slimline DVD-RAM.
Which devices are recommended for install of (or are already supplied with) a custom/compatible firmware?
There’s too many drives out there to know that. You will have to pick one and then do some research to see if there is custom firmware for it or if it’s already pre-hacked like some drives direct from China are.
Thanks for the information.
hi, same problem as josep. i can see the titles but i can’t play them… new ideas?
greets hofi
i mean pablo sry
Have you patched your drive? None of this will work without patching your drive’s firmware to bypass the player certificate authentication.
I am looking to play Blu-ray movies in Linux Mint 10. I bought an ASUS External Slim Blu-ray Writer. I installed everything that the site told me to download and install. I used the GDebi installer to install them. The player sees the disk and all the chapters. Everything seems to work OK except movies don’t play. Regular DVDs play fine, no problem, but I don’t need a Blu-ray hardware player for that.
Running “lxdbplayer” on the command line shows errors and give this output:
rwo@rwo-Lenovo-G555 ~ $ lxbdplayer
Charging plugin … AACSDecrypt (based on DumpHD) : original author KenD00DumpHD (Mod) 0.01 Beta Original Author : KenD00
Opening Key Data File… OK
Initializing AACS… OK
Loading BDVM… FAILED
bdvm.vm.BDVM
Automatic BD+ removal disabled, specify a Conversion Table manually to remove BD+ if necessary
Start time: Fri Apr 08 15:57:50 CDT 2011
Checking source…
Source path: /media/DROPZONE
Initializing source…
Disc type found: Blu-Ray BDMV
Collecting input files…
Source initialized
Identifying source…
Identifying disc… OK
DiscID : 7FBB40E6B682D140A32266831B91C663E9513184
Searching disc in key database…Disc not found in key database
You Are in Linux : DumpKey From MakeMkv… Please Wait it’s maybe long
This disc cannot be decrypt
Finished identifying source
mplayer: could not connect to socket
MPlayer 1.0rc4-4.4.5 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.
Playing -.
PID :11856
DumpHDMod PID :11856
Reading from stdin…
Cannot seek backward in linear streams!
Exiting… (End of file)
End of lxbdplayer output
Running “makemkv” on the command line gives this error message:
“The stored activation key is invalid. I guess someone tampered with settings… Please purcase an activation key if you’ve found this application useful.”
Your issue with AACSKeys is that there is no decryption key available to decode the BD+ conversion table on the disc. Without that, you cannot decode the movie to play it. Unfortunately some titles you will just not be able to play until decoding keys are found for it, particularly titles released in the last 6-12 months.
Your issue with MakeMKV is that you don’t have a valid activation key to run the app. You need to buy one.
Where are you supposed to get these keys??
I always thought that when you bought the hardware that you should also be getting the “keys” to make it work. The player comes with Windows software. Is there a way to get keys from that?
Oh, you can get copies of the keys – if you pay lots and lots of money for them.
A BD Optical Drive is simply a device to access BD media – it is NOT a license to watch movies, much like a car is a means to get you around but does not give you the right to use public roads without a driver’s license.
The keys you require are for decrypting encoded movies on the BD media. The Windows software that comes with your drive you’ve actually paid for (as part of the cost of your drive) – it’s licensed software for playing movies, but it won’t work forever as the keys are constantly updated, forcing you to have to get updated software with new keys.
In the Linux World, someone has to pay for the licensing of the keys, and so far no-one has. The keys you are using now have been discovered though traditional hacking methods. As new keys are found, they are added to AACSKeys’ database.
Successfully installed this now but the films are very slow and sometimes stop and start. How do I fix this problem?
Sounds like you are not using hardware acceleration to decode the video. Make sure you are using an recent NVidia-based graphics card to offload the decoding work to.
Hi folks, I have an HTPC setup running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and XBMC. I have a Panasonic-Matshita UJ-240 optical drive and I was wondering if anyone got this drive working and if yes, how long it takes to load a bluray disc using this approach.
I’m looking forward to know how long it takes (in average) to have the disc loaded and film start playing for linux folks that have this setup working.
Thx!