Bluray on Slackware

Here's information on how I was able to play encrypted Bluray disks on Slackware using a custom MPlayer.

This statement from the MPlayer homepage is vital:
"MPlayer does support encrypted BluRay playback, though not all steps are handled by MPlayer itself. The two alternative methods use the URL schemes bd:// (always supports decryption, but you need the key for each and every disk in ~/.dvdcss/KEYDB.cfg and only works well with very simple BluRays, similar to dvd:// vs. dvdnav://) and br:// (uses libbluray and should support the same as VideoLAN in the link below but that is untested)."

I only got it to work with the "br://" scheme. The MPlayer package that follows the default Slackware installation does NOT link to libbluray, so I had to download and compile it manually, and then use this separate MPlayer binary for Bluray playback only. Prior to this, I had already installed libbluray, libbdplus and libaacs on the system.

I launch it with the following helper script:

#!/bin/sh
if ! fgrep /mnt/cdrom /proc/mounts > /dev/null; then
  mount /mnt/cdrom || exit 1
fi

# Enable debugging info for libbluray:
export BD_DEBUG_MASK="0xFFFFFFF"

# NOTE: Set the BLURAY_TITLE variable to change titles.
# NOTE: Use -chapter <id> argument to change chapters.
export BLURAY_TITLE=0
exec ~/opt/mplayer-bluray-bin br://$BLURAY_TITLE//mnt/cdrom "$@"
          

Finally, you will need to have an updated KEYDB.cfg file at ~/.config/aacs/KEYDB.cfg and hope that the VUK (Volume Unique Key) has been discovered for your Bluray disc.