Hello,
I was wondering if there is a portable player that would play Blu-ray movies?
Thanks.
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so far i havent seen one. the codecs needed are not "free" and i dont know if VLC or CCCP has the codecs for playback.
VC-1 might be a problem, but there is plenty of support for AVC and MPEG-2. I don't know how much support there is for the format (playlist files, menus, etc.) among open source software, but tsMuxeR (freeware) can remux BD titles suitable for use with players that can't/don't/won't support the BD format. Once a title is in that form, then it's a matter of codecs, and AFAIK, open source players can handle the possible codecs except for perhaps VC-1 (and some may have problems with DTS, but libavcodec seems to handle it fine).
Vintage!
Are you trying to play Blu-ray movies using an external BD-ROM or BD-RW drive? If so, you're in the right place (PortableApps.com the site, not sure if this is the right forum... I'd have posted it in the General forum). VLC should be able to do it by now, but I don't know. Don't have a Blu-ray player in my PC yet. Soon... but not yet.
If not, if you just have Blu-ray discs you wish to play on other computers, you should expect that fewer than 0.01% of computers (PC and Mac) are equipped with a Blu-ray player, and will not play your disc in the first place. Generally it's the high-end Sony desktop and laptop computers that can do so, as Blu-ray is their format. Other high-end desktop and laptop computers have the capacity as well, but Sony was probably the first mass PC producer to start doing it. (However, any computer that has a Blu-ray drive probably has the software installed to play it anyway, so you shouldn't have to worry about a portable solution.)
Now, if you're talking about playing downloaded Blu-ray movies, those are shared in .mkv format, and VLC can play those, no problem. So can Media Player Classic by way of the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack.
That's a rip, and of course VLC will play rips. Anything converted to AVC (not sure about video processed by commercial encoders, but x264 is very popular and its video streams are very well supported) will play on VLC.
The best way to play BD content is to remux it (encoding is optional, but don't expect a full quality movie to fit on a flash drive) and use VLC or MPlayer. It's worth noting that a flash drive probably may not be fast enough to read the file. I would recommend a portable hard drive like a WD Passport for this. Also, if the host computer isn't very fast, don't expect it to play HD video.
I have seen things in VLC 1.0.3 that would indicate that it can play BDs, but I have not tested it.
Vintage!
Yes, I'm talking about a movie that I downloaded and the thing is I don't really know where the movie file is located at. There's this BDMV folder which is the biggest so the movie should be in there, and there there is a subfolder in BDMV called "STREAM" that is full of .m2ts files.
Now if I put the just the main movie dir into VLC it'll play it - but I know there are a few different movie versions, plus an interview about the movie - so how can I choose which one of these to play in VLC? I guess that's my real question - whether VLC can actually "read and understand" the structure of a Blu-ray disc/rip?
http://smlabs.net/tsmuxer_en.html
Some BDs are authored in ways that would make picking a .m2ts file from /BDMV/STREAM impractical. tsMuxeR is wonderful for this. You can open a playlist (.mpls) file (similar to the IFO files in DVDs) and it will create a video with the video, audio and subtitle tracks for that title. Playlist files are located in /BDMV/PLAYLIST. You'll have to guess which playlist file corresponds to the title you want, but it should be obvious if the one you chose is the right one given the information displayed. It's more difficult with TV shows since all the episodes will likely have similar information, but it will be easy for films. You can exclude any streams you don't want. Save the file to your portable hard drive and use VLC Portable to play the file.
Vintage!