I decided to connect with my inner 13 year old and bought Army of Darkness on Blu-Ray. Like the rest of my video collection, my goal was to rip it to my NAS so it’s available on my Kodi box; I don’t own a blu-ray player, only Blu-ray optical drives for computers. But, I decided I wanted to just pop the movie in and play it on my PC, should look pretty good on my gaming monitor.
No machine in my inventory would play it from the disc. VLC and the one or two other media players in Fedora’s pathetic excuse for a repository would play it. VLC would throw an error and tell you to look in the log for details…wherever the log is. Side note: I’m not going to see log for details if you don’t give me a link or path to that log. We hold up VLC as the best media player but it can barely play mp3 and mp4 files from the local machine, it doesn’t work across a network, it doesn’t read optical discs, it doesn’t give useful errors and I’m not looking up how to read its logs for more details.
So, several rounds of troubleshooting across a few computers later, I finally get a setup where MakeMKV will rip it from the goddamn disc. And what does the 1080p version of the movie get you? Film grain. Noisy hideous distracting film grain. Exporting it as a 720p video made it look better because crushing the resolution evened out the film grain.
Is this what liking movies is like these days? I don’t think I want to like movies anymore.
The problem with VLC is not that it can’t play certain formats, but that the version of VLC shipping with Fedora is missing certain codecs.
Fedora is not allowed to include them for legal reasons, so you have to install them yourself.
This is a huge pain for the average user, but distros cannot really do anything about it.
You could try fixing the codecs using rpmfusion or alternatively install VLC as a Flatpak.
Yeah, BR looks like a real pain.That’s not VLC or any other player’s fault. The industry made it near impossible to use a BR, even dutifully paid for.
I recently considered starting buying BR discs (we only own DVDs, which all play fine on my Linux machine) but I quickly gave upon the idea when I realized what an effing pain it would be to get them to play without a standard TV and a standard BR player connected to it.
If I can’t easily play it on computer (we have not owned a TV set since the early 00s), well too bad, it only means we won’t watch BR. Which also means more money to spend on other things than BR. Also, it’s not like I’m short on DVDs to (re)watch either.
