How to play Blu-Ray discs with VLC Media Player
On my main machine I have a Blu-Ray player and use VLC Media Player to play the discs. It’s been working quite well and I recently purchased another Blu-Ray player for a secondary machine. Much to my surprise and gnashing of teeth, VLC would not play Blu-Ray discs. What the devil goes on here? Why isn’t this working? I thought VLC handled Blu-Ray discs?
Well, yes and no. It can indeed play them, but it may have an issue with the encoding mechanism used. There is an option to play the Blu-Ray disc right in the menu, but it might not always work. My primary machine works with each disc I insert because I have AnyDVD HD on it and that handles all the decoding. Now I could just install AnyDVD HD on the other machine, but it’s used for gaming and I don’t want to load anything I don’t have to.
I turned my attentions to the Internet and was able to find a solution that should work in most cases. I say "should" since this is an experimental solution and is not guaranteed to work with all discs.
What you need to do is grab a config file and a DLL that’s used to play the discs. It’s a simple process and literally takes a couple of seconds, but some of the steps were a little cryptic at first.
Once you install VLC Media Player head to this location –http://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/ – It contains the config file and the DLL you need.
Install the KEYDB.cfg in the %APPDATA% directory. Easiest thing to do is type %appdata% on the Run line. This should put you in the C:\Users\<usermame>\appdata\Roaming directory. CREATE a new directory called AACS. Once the folder is created put the KEYDB.cfg in the folder.
Open your VLC directory, the directory where you installed VLC. Since I have the 64-bit version the location is C:/Program Files/VideoLAN/VLC.
Take the liabaacs.dll and place it in the VideoLAN directory. You will see all the other .dll and .exe files that VLC uses.
Once this is done you can open VLC, select Open Disc, click Blu-Ray and the movie should play. I did this with a copy of The Others and it played fine. Again, this is an experimental process so it may not work in all cases. As mentioned, purchasing a copy of AnyDVD HD, which I recommend anyway, will also solve the problem.
