Want to Watch Blu-rays in VLC on Ubuntu? You NEED MakeMKV - OMG! Ubuntu!

I picked up a cheap external USB Blu-ray drive recently with the aim of watching my Doctor Who ‘The Collection’ Blu-rays — WhoRays, if you will— in bed, on my laptop1 (which runs Ubuntu, obviously).

Thing is you can’t just stick in an official Blu-ray disc and watch what’s on it, not in Linux, not on macOS, and not even on Windows.

I figured I’d pass on the knowledge so that anyone else out there who wants to watch Blu-rays in Ubuntu (or on another Ubuntu-based Linux distro) can follow my steps to satisfy their content-craving.

Installing MakeMKV on most Linux distributions is done by compiling it.

Alternatively, you can use a third-party PPA that pre-packages the latest MakeMKV beta release for easy install on Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros — this is the route I used.

Now open MakeMKV (be aware if you have a disc in your drive when you launch the app it will scan it before you can do anything else) and enter the latest beta key in the ‘register’ box.

Insert a Blu-ray, open VLC, and go to “Open Disc…” > Blu-ray > Play.

It’s also a well-regarded Blu-ray ripping tool that can copy entire disks, and lets you convert specific titles within a disc to the MKV format, complete with audio options, subtitle tracks, and what not intact.

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