Perhaps i’m beating a dead horse here, but is there an alternative to Cyberlink’s PowerDVD for Windows?
Seeing as the only useful feature of this software suite for me is the Blu-ray playback capability it doesn’t exactly strike me as ideal to pay US$55 to US$70 for a software suite i’ll mostly won’t use, not only that, Cyberlink updates this suite annualy and abandons the previous version, which means you have to pay them more money if you want to keep your suite updated.
So, do you guys know of a good alternative to PowerDVD for Blu-ray playback?
Free or open source software would be ideal but not expected, so i’m considering premium software as well.
I have been thinking about the same thing. Also encription stuff that makes it harder to decode them on PC/MAC - that too probably adds to the price. In europe - a basic 1080 bluray sony whatever starts from 90 eur, a bit more fancy one with 4k upscaling costs around 120 eur and true 4k bluray player starts from 220 eur = it is probably much cheaper just to purchase a standalone player and call it a day as it will not have yearly updating costs.
Free: makemkv + latest free beta key, but you loose menu and structure, on the plus side - your disc is backed up if you go this route.
Last time I tried to play encripted bluray using VLC -> my system strated glitching (mac and windows). Without a proprer software one has to rip it to be able to play it back. Discs without encryption are all good. It just seems so stupid to add DRM to the disc as it is so easy to break. And once it is broken this DRM just causes more issues than good. Ehh…
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an Xbox One S is the best standalone blu-ray player I think but if you really wanna do in Windows it is possible to do it with VLC but it requires you can obtain a key database with the decryption keys
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Come to think of it, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense playing Blurays on PC, its hard to do it and the software is expensive.
I do have two very decent, standard blu-ray players in the form of a PS3 and PS4, they do the job quite well, what i had on my mind was, i have a blu-ray burner on my machine for backups, so i could use that as a player as well, but in retrospect it really doesn’t seem worth it.
I heard they are quite good, lots of people with really expensive home cinema setups using them as well, so there’s credibility.
I agree with @PeterisSudakovs, on pc it’s waay to finicky.
I rip all my blurays as mkv files to my nas, and watch them on my tv with on my HTPC running ubuntu and kodi.
But that really isn’t playing a blu ray disc on pc.
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Maybe that is how the big boys intended it -> for people to just hack it by default before using it. Step 1 - remove DRM, Step 2 - press play. Seems so stupid but this is essentially how most of the stuff works with BluRay format.
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