Windows 10 Blu-Ray playback

Ryankirsch13

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 11, 2015
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Hi all, I'm searching for a reliable software for blu ray playback in windows 10. I don't necessarily want to download some sketchy free software. I don't mind paying for software, I simply want something reliable. Thanks all!
 
Hi all, I'm searching for a reliable software for blu ray playback in windows 10. I don't necessarily want to download some sketchy free software. I don't mind paying for software, I simply want something reliable. Thanks all!
Are you taking about playing back a commercial pressed Blu-ray from an optical drive? If so, PowerDVD is about your only option. If you're taking about decrypted ISO files there are a few other options.
 
Personally I'm still using Corel WinDVD Pro 11 that I bought a few years ago. I only use it to watch DVD/BR movies, and I don't use ANY of the other functionality of the software. It seems to work fine, and Corel is still pushing out the key updates to play newer movies.
 
For free: Best Free Blu-ray Player Software for Windows - Leawo Free Blu-ray Player

It's very basic, and fairly clunky, but it works. Improvements are being made almost weekly, so who knows? It may end up a decent player in a year or so.

PowerDVD has a history of abandoning versions that are not that old. Got a problem? Buy the new version! Screw them!

Arcsoft had a great player, and suddenly decided it didn't want to sell 'em any more.
 
I use Passkey Lite from the makers of DVDFab to decrypt Blu-rays in real-time - not that I have that many of them, just a handful at this point and no real interest in buying more but these were cheap at a pawn shop so I grabbed 'em. I run it, let it works its magic, then I fire up MPC-HC and play the disc without any issues or use HandBrake to convert it to something for my smartphone easy peasy.
 
I use Passkey Lite from the makers of DVDFab to decrypt Blu-rays in real-time - not that I have that many of them, just a handful at this point and no real interest in buying more but these were cheap at a pawn shop so I grabbed 'em. I run it, let it works its magic, then I fire up MPC-HC and play the disc without any issues or use HandBrake to convert it to something for my smartphone easy peasy.
There's no catch with this? No hidden spyware or anything? I looked at their other products and the price seems pretty high. If this works, I may just hook up an old drive I have lying around to watch some of my Blus.
 
PowerDVD has a history of abandoning versions that are not that old. Got a problem? Buy the new version! Screw them!

Agreed, but I think PowerDVD is excellent. Never had any problems, even with 3D Blu Rays in Windows 10. Not that there's anything about Windows 10 and 3D BDs that I know of, just that they've all worked perfectly in Windows 10 since Day One of Windows 10.

Arcsoft had a great player, and suddenly decided it didn't want to sell 'em any more.

It was good, but PowerDVD to me has proven to be better.
 
There's no catch with this? No hidden spyware or anything? I looked at their other products and the price seems pretty high. If this works, I may just hook up an old drive I have lying around to watch some of my Blus.

The catch is that some Blu-rays simply won't be decrypted for various reasons, it's a random thing and the only "fix" is to buy the product but I personally haven't had issues - the 4 Blu-rays that I happen to own (I said I don't own many) all play just fine. I only bought 'em 'cause they were cheap, like $2 each, and they're movies I like and thought it would be cool to grab 'em and rip 'em to a format for my smartphone with HandBrake and that process worked without issues using a laptop Blu-ray drive (Panasonic UJ240).

The only way to know is install it (not like it's costing you anything) and then use it till you encounter a disc it won't decrypt or handle I suppose. Realize it's not a Blu-ray player, it just provides real-time decryption of the contents of a Blu-ray disc for playback using some other player software. It can also be used to rip a Blu-ray to a storage device fully, but if you're going to do that then MakeMKV is still the preferred recommendation since it'll be in MKV files you can play immediately - this utility just rips it into the folder structure in a 1:1 copy.
 
The catch is that some Blu-rays simply won't be decrypted for various reasons, it's a random thing and the only "fix" is to buy the product but I personally haven't had issues - the 4 Blu-rays that I happen to own (I said I don't own many) all play just fine. I only bought 'em 'cause they were cheap, like $2 each, and they're movies I like and thought it would be cool to grab 'em and rip 'em to a format for my smartphone with HandBrake and that process worked without issues using a laptop Blu-ray drive (Panasonic UJ240).

The only way to know is install it (not like it's costing you anything) and then use it till you encounter a disc it won't decrypt or handle I suppose. Realize it's not a Blu-ray player, it just provides real-time decryption of the contents of a Blu-ray disc for playback using some other player software. It can also be used to rip a Blu-ray to a storage device fully, but if you're going to do that then MakeMKV is still the preferred recommendation since it'll be in MKV files you can play immediately - this utility just rips it into the folder structure in a 1:1 copy.
I have a bunch of unusual Blus I bought in Mexico that I really want to watch, and since the company is notorious for doing the absolute bare minimum effort on their releases, there's a 99% chance these don't have any funky protection, so they should work fine.

I guess I'll give it a shot! Thank you. :D
 
There's no catch with this? No hidden spyware or anything? I looked at their other products and the price seems pretty high. If this works, I may just hook up an old drive I have lying around to watch some of my Blus.
The catch is you don't get menus and it only plays the longest title on the disc by default, which may not be what you want to watch. It also doesn't properly select audio tracks and subtitles because that's done by VM commands courtesy of the menus (that it doesn't support). So, as long as you're not watching TV shows or multiple episodes on one disc content, and don't encounter movies with forced subtitles that aren't burned into the video stream it will work okay. All in all, it's a unsatisfactory solution IMHO. VLC has been doing a lot of work to get working menu support, but AFAIK it's in beta.

Myself, I finally broke down and bought a standalone 3D capable Blu-ray player for a very good reason. I got finally sick of the limitations of MPC-HC after Arcsoft pulled out of the market. TMT5 wouldn't bitstream the HD audio formats after a video card change so it was useless. I've tried to persuade the various developers of some of these open source projects to add menu support using the library the VLC folks have been developing, but they refuse claiming no one (meaning themselves) cares about menus. Apparently it's easier to demux a disc to a .mkv to watch it than it is to drop a disc in the drive and hit play. :confused:
 
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I use Passkey Lite from the makers of DVDFab to decrypt Blu-rays in real-time - not that I have that many of them, just a handful at this point and no real interest in buying more but these were cheap at a pawn shop so I grabbed 'em. I run it, let it works its magic, then I fire up MPC-HC and play the disc without any issues or use HandBrake to convert it to something for my smartphone easy peasy.
DVDFab also has standalone media player product. "Dvdfab Media player". The free version only presents a list of titles on the right you can choose. The paid version will do blu-ray menus.
It will playback ISOs and folder structures though I don't know if it does the decryption, i've always had passkey (paid version) running in the background.
 
Try PotPlayer.....plays everything I've thrown at it so far

It does not handle decryption. Most of the common players (Zoom, MPC, VLC) can handle the video files, but only if you've taken care of the encryption first.
 
PowerDVD is what I use if I just want to play a disc.

My other method is...

1) Buy discs
2) Install K-Lite Video codec pack
3) Install/Run MakeMKV
4) Rip to media server
5) Play files from media server

I'm building a small collection of Ultra Blu-ray discs but MakeMKV doesn't handle them yet.
 
The Arcsoft TotalMediaTheatre used to be a solid product, but I don't know if they've updated it in years. It's definitely less bloated than PowerDVD...which has sadly gotten better but is still messy.
While PowerDVD might be great for most people, it's overkill for those of us that only need it to play disks. None of the free options are very good and the decrypter/MPC method is clunky at best.

If someone would simply make a bulletproof plug-in for MPC I'd jump on that train. Hell, I'd happily pay 2/3 of what PowerDVD costs. I don't want any bells and whistles - just a 100% effective way to play Blu-Ray and DVD disks using MPC (VLC is fine, too) natively.
 
The Arcsoft TotalMediaTheatre used to be a solid product, but I don't know if they've updated it in years. It's definitely less bloated than PowerDVD...which has sadly gotten better but is still messy.
While PowerDVD might be great for most people, it's overkill for those of us that only need it to play disks. None of the free options are very good and the decrypter/MPC method is clunky at best.

If someone would simply make a bulletproof plug-in for MPC I'd jump on that train. Hell, I'd happily pay 2/3 of what PowerDVD costs. I don't want any bells and whistles - just a 100% effective way to play Blu-Ray and DVD disks using MPC (VLC is fine, too) natively.

Powerdvd is the only option. Arcsoft dropped support for TMT and pretty much gave all the customers the middle finger.
 
Powerdvd is the only option. Arcsoft dropped support for TMT and pretty much gave all the customers the middle finger.
WinDVD is still around so it's not the "only option".
Similar with the playback software from DVDfab, the free version does main movie only, the paid version does menus.
 
In taking a quick glance at WinDVD, it actually takes a bit of looking around to even discover that it plays Blu-Rays. They keep yammering on about DVD's and video file formats, though. Doesn't seem like a good sign.
At this point I'm a paid PowerDVD 16 customer, but if someone could give me a bulletproof (w/ menus) codec for an existing media player I'd jump ship in a heartbeat.
 
In taking a quick glance at WinDVD, it actually takes a bit of looking around to even discover that it plays Blu-Rays. They keep yammering on about DVD's and video file formats, though. Doesn't seem like a good sign.
At this point I'm a paid PowerDVD 16 customer, but if someone could give me a bulletproof (w/ menus) codec for an existing media player I'd jump ship in a heartbeat.
WinDVD Pro supports Blu-ray playback. The base version still only plays DVD, as far as I'm aware. I much prefer WinDVD over PowerDVD, mainly because I could never get surround sound or 24 Hz playback working correctly in the latter. At the time that I bought WinDVD Pro it was also the only Blu-ray software around supporting 3D Blu-ray playback through the NVIDIA drivers.
 
Does PowerDVD work with menus? Also can it tell you what MPLS it's playing? Sometimes I wish I had a good way to figure that stuff out before ripping.....as noted VLC sucks when trying to actually navigate a bluray.
 
Does PowerDVD work with menus? Also can it tell you what MPLS it's playing? Sometimes I wish I had a good way to figure that stuff out before ripping.....as noted VLC sucks when trying to actually navigate a bluray.
Last time I used powerdvd (15?) it did fine.
 
Seems PowerDVD 17 is on the way in the next week. I won't post the thread here, but if you just google "PowerDVD 17" Someone in the RedFox forum outs all of the details including download links from Cyberlink's site. As expected, it seems to primarily be focused on playing UHD Blu-Rays via a Kaby Lake system. For those of us that aren't going that route, it doesn't appear to add much or change much.
Unless something changes (or the discounts are extra steep for previous owners), I'll skip this one.
I do kinda wish PowerDVD 16 had some better way to control brightness variance within different disks. In using Nvidia's video control panel, I find that some look best at 50 while others I have to go as low as 42 or 43. This is all the while everything looks flawless and immediately correct on the PS4 by default. I'd like some sort of set it once and leave it video brightness setting.
 
Redfox AnyDVD HD and Jriver is the ultimate combo.
 
So I guess the ole VLC player doesn't play blue rays? That's too bad.

There used to be some plugins that would make it work (kind of like with MPC-HC) but I think you still needed AnyDVD. Menus were still non-functional, too.
 
So I guess the ole VLC player doesn't play blue rays? That's too bad.
Doesn't crack the encryption and like Domingo said menus are non-functional. (kind of understandable given they use BD-J which is a java stack)
 
I'll necro this old thread for something I've recently discovered. PowerDVD seems to finally recognize different color spaces. For years I've had to keep a separate Nvidia configuration just for playing DVD's and Blu-Rays in PowerDVD. It would either crush the blacks or the brightness would be way too high depending on whether I used Full or Limited RGB. Every other program (like MPC-HC, VLC, or Kodi) looks fine, but PowerDVD needed it's own setup.
Not sure if it was Cyberlink finally fixing it or Nvidia or even Microsoft, but it finally looks good out of the box. This past weekend I noticed that my toggle looked off. When I set everything to normal...it looked great. I did some head to heads vs. my PS4 and Xbox and it (finally) looks right.

It's still a bloated program with way too many quirks (that still won't play UHD Blu-Rays with Nvidia hardware), but this is at least something good for people that want to play disks without ripping them.
 
(that still won't play UHD Blu-Rays with Nvidia hardware)

UHD support which is clearly pointed out by Cyberlink requires Intel SGX extensions. I don't know of anything nVidia has ever mentioned about supporting UHD BD though they do support 4k Netflix. Whatever I upgrade to next WILL support UHD playback. I'm on PowerDVD 18, it's pretty damned good I think, runs great on my sig rig, even the VR support is pretty good. But yeah no UHD support with this kind of hardware sucks.
 
LOL, just as silently as this was "fixed" it has now reverted. Again, not sure if this is Windows, Cyberlink, or Nvidia's doing. I'm back to having to set a specific color profile just for PowerDVD.
 
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