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.
I DID install it from Flatpak. And it seems that Blu-Ray is an extra special pain in the ass. MakeMKV was talking about how it can work as a codec plugin for blu-ray decode in other media players including VLC and then there’s no instructions anywhere on how, so no it can’t. I’m just…convinced VLC isn’t as good as everyone says it is.
Why will VLC on my phone play mp4 files from my NAS but VLC on my desktop won’t when mpv will?
Haven’t actually done this with Flatpak, but I know it can be a pain.
I see flathub lists an makemkv add-on for VLC - is that installed? I’m not sure what codecs the VLC flatpak even includes or if it suffers from the same licensing restrictions.
So…
I got the DVD to rip in MakeMKV on my old computer running Mint. I cannot get MakeMKV to work as a decoder for VLC on that machine; there’s no documentation that walks you through how to do that, everyone in their forums talks in links to other threads, I’m going to assume that flatpak CAN’T work because flatpak. It does recognize discs on that machine though and can rip them. That makemkv addon flatpak shows up in Fedora’s software manager but not on Mint’s. It seems to do nothing.
On my Fedora machine, neither MakeMKV nor Handbrake seem to function at all. Neither of those applications seem to be able to interact with the disc drive in any way. VLC can play ordinary DVDs, so the drive is functioning and talking to the OS. MakeMKV either seems to work normally if you launch it without the optical drive attached or with it empty of discs, the second you put a disc in it spools a thread up and then just hangs forever. DVD drive isn’t doing anything. Doesn’t matter if it’s a DVD or a blu-ray. Handbrake just doesn’t do anything, there’s nothing you can do to select the optical drive as a source. Just sits there with it’s tongue in its ass waiting for a round of applause.
Neither app is available from Fedora’s repos as a .rpm. Nothing ever is. Neither app offers instructions for compiling on Fedora. Nothing ever does. If you try to follow the compile instructions for Debian substituting apt-get install for dnf install, inevitably the packages it wants aren’t in the repos. Because nothing ever is. I’m distro hopping tomorrow.
it can barely play mp3 and mp4 files from the local machine, it doesn’t work across a network,
lol… you’re very wrong
Whatever dude, I keep seeing VLC not do what I want or need it to do, and I’m sick to my eyebrows of trying to troubleshoot it.
the name VLC comes from “VideoLAN Client”….
i.e. it works over the network.
also, i’ve been using it for 20 years and it’s just fine for mp3 and mp4…. sounds like you’re missing a codec, but after you install that, maybe try MPV, it uses the same libraries as VLC and supposed has better hardware support… also it’s a lot simpler.
vlc is pretty easy to fuck up some tiny settings somewhere and forget about it, as it has a shitload of advanced features you’ll probably never want to use.
Your main problem is trying to play it on a computer. It’s always been a pain to play movies from disc on a computer. The MPAA is so fucking terrified of people being able to make copies they crippled the usability of the media on computers. Doesn’t stop people from pirating. Just fucks over anyone who wants to watch a movie they own on a computer.
DVDs work more or less fine. Blu-rays are a complete scrotal gash.
So few devices nowadays come with optical drives, I tend to rip my videos to mp4 anyway, I had planned to do this with this disc in the first place. I decided to buy the disc to have at least some pretense of legitimacy. I did get it ripped and I did watch the movie.
I bought Lord of the Rings extended edition on HD bluray, and a new Bluray drive for my PC, only to discover that it wouldn’t play because the drive had been given firmware that blocks the use of HD bluray.
After a bit of research, I learned that you can downgrade the firmware to an earlier version, then rip the content so it can be played, but you risk destroying the drive.
I finally got to watch my movies, but realised that piracy would have been more convenient.
A few months ago (I’ll make another post about this, it’s probably more what the community’s founder had in mind) I bought some CDs from a band I like. They were kickstarting a new album, and they offered a bunch of their back catalog as an add-on bonus. Bought it from the band on their terms, so I’m confident the artists themselves and not some private equity holding company got paid. I got media that functions perfectly well in every device I own including my high school Discman, I was able to effortlessly rip them to FLACs and now I’ve got high quality audio to enjoy on the go on my modern smart phone. It works, we all got to be legitimate citizens of a society, it’s great.
I’m not convinced Sam Raimi or Bruce Campbell got paid from my purchase. I bought the movie in new still sealed condition from eBay, it’s a genuine disc, so at some point it did come from Warner Brothers and was probably purchased at least once wholesale before I bought it. Did any money from any of those transactions go to the artists who actually made the film or have they been paid in full and further sales don’t affect them? What I got was a product so riddled with DRM and/or proprietary codecs that attempts to play it legitimately failed but ripping it worked. To engage with movies, you have to be a bad guy.
I guess at the end of the day I did get to her Ash say “this is my BOOMSTICK” and that was fun.
I had similar experiences when trying to play Blu Ray Discs recently and wanting DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. The software for playing DVDs/BDs does not work with modern systems and Win10 and anything working for a modern systems lacks the proper licenses for the audio and just converts everything down to stereo. So my sound system sat there waiting for correctly encoded data streams getting bored. Back when I was in my teens, the sound card came with everything you needed for surround sound and the DVD/BD drive came with everything you needed for quality video. Resorted to digital non-physical media.
Upvoted for the log file rant … I feel you pal
