Blu-Ray Support?

[sovereign]

I have been searching without any luck. Does boxee have blu-ray support? Is there an app or something of that nature I can add to get the support?

[Prospero424]

The 1.0 software on the Boxee box that's coming to the desktop some time this year will allow playback of unencrypted BluRay .iso disc images, but support for direct playback of commercial BluRays isn't feasible for technical and legal reasons. The issue is the copy protection. Software like AnyDVD and DVDFab will allow you to rip your BluRay discs to unencrypted .iso images.

For the current version of the Boxee desktop software (0.9), most people use a program like MakeMKV to rip their BluRay discs to an uncompressed .mkv file with the original video and audio streams from the BluRay. There's no loss of quality, but you lose the BluRay menus and extra features contained on the disc.

There are also ways to compress the resulting movies so that they don't take up nearly as much space (25-40GB for most BluRay movies). See the guide link in my signature for help on that.

[sovereign]

The 1.0 software on the Boxee box that's coming to the desktop some time this year will allow playback of unencrypted BluRay .iso disc images, but support for direct playback of commercial BluRays isn't feasible for technical and legal reasons. The issue is the copy protection. Software like AnyDVD and DVDFab will allow you to rip your BluRay discs to unencrypted .iso images.

For the current version of the Boxee desktop software (0.9), most people use a program like MakeMKV to rip their BluRay discs to an uncompressed .mkv file with the original video and audio streams from the BluRay. There's no loss of quality, but you lose the BluRay menus and extra features contained on the disc.

There are also ways to compress the resulting movies so that they don't take up nearly as much space (25-40GB for most BluRay movies). See the guide link in my signature for help on that.

Thanks for the response! I won't mind running AnyDVD, and I do have a lot of movies already in mkv, but I would like to be able to watch the disc versions which are not compressed. I was just hoping for native playback, which seems like it will be added.

Thanks again.

[gmd024]

Thanks for the response! I won't mind running AnyDVD, and I do have a lot of movies already in mkv, but I would like to be able to watch the disc versions which are not compressed. I was just hoping for native playback, which seems like it will be added.

Thanks again.

I have many BD ISO rips that the Boxee beta app will play - but first the content has to be mounted with a Virtual Drive - my BD ISO rips are coming over the network from either from a Windows Home Server or USB HDDs and have to be shared on the network

And of course you access the Virtual Drive in the Boxee app and not the actual ISO rip - Virtual CloneDrive is the one I use and has been 'adopted' by SlySoft

You may have to drill down through the folders and m2ts files to find the main movie

You can also watch the same BD ISOs from an external Blu-ray Optical disc played in the Boxee app - but the ISO must first be unencrypted (AnyDVD HD) and then burnt to a BD or shrunk down (BD Rebuilber) to a DVD or DL DVD

In any case you won't have menu support