spent a few hours on my off day this week messing around with hd-dvd and blu-ray .evo files. These are basically the full hd-dvd and blu-ray discs with protection removed and ripped into .evo files. I own departed, sleepy hollow and batman begins in HD format so those are the ones I messed with...

After compiling mplayer from SVN and installing, all I had to do was add the .evo format to myth video and have it call the standard mplayer external command line.

Definitely the best looking HD video I've gotten out of my myth box. No frame rate problems at all. I'm using a dual core Intel D 830. The picture was comparable to the PS3 and a bit nicer than my xbox 360 with hd drive... still waiting on the Google summer of code project for this year to get the E-AC3 sound format supported but once that is done we should be able to play these from the Linux/myth box with minimal trouble (although if you want to keep/archive these rips you would need massive storage... 25GB at minimum per rip). Also I think it's only a matter of time before linux supports blu-ray and hd-dvd drives with some form of software to allow playback.
a good info link is:
http://codecs.multimedia.cx/ - Kostya's Wild Codec World

spent a few hours on my off day this week messing around with hd-dvd and blu-ray .evo files. These are basically the full hd-dvd and blu-ray discs with protection removed and ripped into .evo files. I own departed, sleepy hollow and batman begins in HD format so those are the ones I messed with...

After compiling mplayer from SVN and installing, all I had to do was add the .evo format to myth video and have it call the standard mplayer external command line.

Definitely the best looking HD video I've gotten out of my myth box. No frame rate problems at all. I'm using a dual core Intel D 830. The picture was comparable to the PS3 and a bit nicer than my xbox 360 with hd drive... still waiting on the Google summer of code project for this year to get the E-AC3 sound format supported but once that is done we should be able to play these from the Linux/myth box with minimal trouble (although if you want to keep/archive these rips you would need massive storage... 25GB at minimum per rip). Also I think it's only a matter of time before linux supports blu-ray and hd-dvd drives with some form of software to allow playback.
a good info link is:
http://codecs.multimedia.cx/ - Kostya's Wild Codec World

That's fantastic news. I was wondering when this was going to happen, but figured it wasn't anytime soon. Thanks for the report! Hopefully it gets picked up by Mythtv before 0.21 is released.

Sweet deal!

What about xine? Can it be used to play hd-dvd and blu-ray .evo files?

so far only ffmpeg (part of mplayer) and mplayer have the support that I am aware of. VLC is trying to add it.

Call me stupid, but can't FFmpeg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFmpeg be used by xine? Isn't it a stand-alone library, that can be compiled independently? :confused:

maybe? not really sure I've never done it. I like using mplayer but have used xine in the past (when mplayer didn't have dvd menu's)

I was wondering if anyone's been working on more robust BD support, and if so, how that's going.

It would be really nice to be able to just play the disc, rather than having to rip it to a decoded/decrypted disk image first.

I've found the easiest thing to do is just wrap the extracted files in a MKV container. I use eac3to to process my ripped HD/bluray discs, putting the video in a mkv file, and converting the audio to 1536k DTS (for lossy tracks) and flac (for lossless). Then I use mkvmerge to combine the audio/video and chapters file (also extracted using eac3to).

The resulting files are quite large as noted (15-30GB), but the A/V quality is preserved, and I have my movie library available at the press of my remote. FWIW, I use XBMC Live for media playback (which uses mplayer).

But how do you rip the full hd-dvd or blu-ray disk with protection removed?

That's what I'm wondering myself. If you can rip the discs and remove the DRM, and then play the file with mplayer, why exactly can't you just play the discs?

But how do you rip the full hd-dvd or blu-ray disk with protection removed?

Slysoft AnyDVD HD

That's what I'm wondering myself. If you can rip the discs and remove the DRM, and then play the file with mplayer, why exactly can't you just play the discs?

because there's more to playing a disc than playing the elementary audio/video streams it contains - you need to "play" the full runtime environment on the disc (HD-i for HD-DVD, BD-Java for Bluray)

No Linux ripper yet?

ok that makes a little more sense now. You have to have the Slysoft or similar to rip them with.