Video Reel – A Visual Guide To Playing Blu-ray Discs on Linux

Note: I meant “Avatar” instead of Pandora in the voice over.  Pandora was the planet the action took place on.

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A Guide To Playing Blu-rays On Ubuntu Linux
30 Days of Linux: Day 6 – Blu Ray ripping time with MakeMKV and Handbrake
By The Beard Of Zeus! – VLC and libbdplus for Blu-ray Playback
How To – Making a Media Center Using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

A Guide To Playing Blu-rays On Ubuntu Linux

Today tis a happy day.  A noble day.  A day for dancing and chivalry.  We shall deck the courtyard in the finest tapestries, fill the cups with the finest wine, deck the halls with beautiful women, and grunt like men. All shall hear me roar “In your face Blu-ray!”  Interested now?  I thought so.

Managing A Programs’ CPU and Memory Utilization With cgroups

There are many days, especially days I have off from work, that I want to do a little ripping/encoding of my movie collection (still have a ways to go).  While MakeMKV will not tax my i5 2600k Intel processor, handbrake will, of course.  If you wish to still work on various average tasks on your system without a large amount of slowdown, you will want to setup cgroups to handle either handbrake or MakeMKV’s CPU/Memory constraints.  I will also go through an alternative universal method.  Read on for more

30 Days of GNU\Linux: Day 9

Today was my birthday, so I did a little bit of Linux work, wait no… A LOT!  I purchased a Roku to fill the void for online services I can’t get currently running under Linux Mint *cough* *Amazon Instant*  So far the Roku + Plex Media Center for my network files is boding rather well.  Initially, Linux Mint could see no far past the root directory of my share drive, but after converting the drive to Ext4, and fixing the permissions, I was all set.  If there is one* media center I would have to recommend Linux users with a Roku box, it would be Plex.  Setting up an Apache2 server is much too much work, but yes, that works well too with Roksbox.

On the Remote support side, I was very pleased with the Linux support for TeamViewer.  TeamViewer is a cross-platform, free (in price), and versatile application to remote into ANY of your machines from home or afar.  I highly suggest it.  If you still prefer VNC, then by all means, but for others, this is the ticket.

Also, got the additional Blu Ray drive to rip and transcode my Blu Ray collection.  It will take some time to convert it over (I only have about 50 Blu Rays , give or take), but it’s something us Linux users have to live with, unless you stream with MakeMKV, which to be honest I have not tried seeing if the UPnP stream of MakeMVK shows up on my Roku…maybe!!!

That’s it for today.  Till tomorrow,

-Professor

30 Days of GNU\Linux: Day 8

Credit: Comedy Central

As I sit here watching Tosh.0, trying to concentrate on writing, I can’t help but be at least very happy at my progress using only Linux at home.  As of this, I have installed Chromium Browser, which as of today as well, is using the VP9 open codec under the WebM project by Google.  Dang, did my online videos  speed up!  The once herky-jerky video that sometimes buffered even on my 8 year old HTPC (Core 2 Duo / ATI SFF 5400 series GPU), are now fluid and at least 720p quality now.  I am very impressed with this Open Codec. So, now that my online browser experience is nice and smooth what is left?  TONS!

I made good progress determining the proper Handbrake settings so that XBMC on my ancient Linux HTPC runs smoothly.  Aside from minor scan lines on some scenes, things are progressing well.  I at least got everything playing smoothly, and know the program well.  For those who don’t know, you must break the Blu Ray encryption first with MakeMKV.  Both of these are in the software section of this site.  The settings I had the most luck with, is 1280×720 (720p), MP4 format, H.264 codec, default decomb/deinterlace.  I made those changes after starting with the Apple TV preset for 720p.  Try different settings and see what happens!

Still searching for solutions to Amazon Instant Video, and if Linux teaches you anything, it’s DON’T GIVE UP!   Oh, yes Hulu and other online services play very smoothly now under Chromium Browser:

 sudo apt-get update 
 sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

30 Days of Linux: Day 6 – Blu Ray ripping time with MakeMKV and Handbrake

Did some testing with MakeMKV and Handbrake.  MakeMKV is designed to rip your Blu Ray discs to an MKV container format.  What you do from there is more important, as you will end up with a huge file in the neighborhood of 30-70 odd Gigabytes!  This is where Handbrake comes in (install instructions for both below).  With Handbrake, you trans-code the video (transforming its internal format).  This will result, when done properly, into a much smaller file size, and often a better file all together.  Getting the “proper” or “correct” settings is the hard part.

Getting the right settings involves some trial and error.  I could go through the endless settings, but what works for me, may not for you.  I can* however, give you some insight:

Read on for more: