Current state on encrypted DVD/BD playback on Kodi using add-on
#1
For the last couple of years, i'm been a Kodi user and recently upgraded my RPi-2 to a RPi-3.
About the only add-ons i use or have tried are for backing up my configuration, the language preference manager and the texturecachemaintenace cleanup script (not an add-on as such).

So it's fair to say i don't stream at all.
I'm entertained enough watching films at the cinema once a week (for the last few decades) for that big screen experiance.
And when not watching a film at the cinema, i'm entertained enough at home watching my own rips i've made from my own extensive BD's and DVD's collection though on a much much smaller plasma TV.

DVDShrink, Decrypter, ifoedit, fixvts, pgcedit and RipIt4Me were used at variuos times when ripping my DVD's.
These have largely been replaced by MakeMKV and HandBrake once i started to rip my BD's.
Even though ripping ones own DVD/BDs is technically illegal, i do have a clear consciense as i have and still do pump massive $ into the movie cabal's bank accounts each year.
About the only downside is it takes time to rip the disks.

And today while browsing myce.com, i was a little dismayed but not surprised to hear that AACS-LA are still pressing to remove DVDfab from existance using every legal trick they can muster.
I'm just hoping that they do not kill all the other BD rippers that exist as the AACS-LA wage their futile war which only serves to alienate their own paying customers.

What was interesting to read today was that XBMC got a mention via a VidOn add-on that uses the decryption engine of DVDfab, presumably to play encrypted DVD's and BD's.
This peeked my interest as ripping stuff is sometimes a chore ii'd rather not have to do.
Maybe i'd prefer to use .nfo stubs and insert a disc into a usb BD drive connected to my RPi (or a PC) and have it decrypt the disc on the fly and simply play via the DVD/BD menu.

So my question are:

1) what is the state of encrypted DVD and encrypted BD playback (playing a dics with menus) using Kodi and some legit (from Kodi's prespective) add-on?

2) is the Vidon box the only Kodi based player out there that can play DVD/BD menus from discs themselves and does it come with all the crap banned add-ons i have no interest in?[/u]
I'm a XBMC novice :)
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#2
(2016-05-15, 10:22)skylarking Wrote: 1) what is the state of encrypted DVD and encrypted BD playback (playing a dics with menus) using Kodi and some legit (from Kodi's prespective) add-ons,
I have I have a Raspberry Pi 2 running libreelec with an external Blu-ray player conected with a powered usb hub. Using that setup I can play DVD menus perfectly fine. Playing Blu-rays is another story there's an initial setup (KEYDB.cfg) that you have to go through to get them to work and the js menus sometimes don't work. Using the simplified menue works fine. There are no add-ons that are needed.
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#3
@Av3nged, thanks for the heads up, i'll move to LibreElec in the next couple of days and have a play.

Last i tried playing BD's on linux was a year ago using VLC and i must admit it wasn't a success. Hopefully it has improved so i will again try latest VLC as well as LibreElec. It's just to find a KEYDB.cfg file that has the keys for my BD collection.

From what you said it does sound like DVD playback via LibreElec is a non issue. Meanwhile i guess BD playback handles AACS decryption via KEYDB.cfg but what about DB+ descrambling? Is this handled OK or do you sometimes get a scrambled picture on DB+ protected discs (as well as BD-J menu issues as already mentioned)?
I'm a XBMC novice :)
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#4
BD-J is not yet supported, Ace is working on adding it, but it will only ever be as good as whatever libbluray is supporting.

As for the decryption - there is at least no official add-on. Some distros like libreelec come with libaacs and libbdplus (IIRC) and you might be able to get these going and work for your needs. Personally I have a Windows box running AnyDVD-HD and access the bluray drive as network share from all my Kodi boxes. It's ofc not the nicest solution as I have to walk to the Windows box first, but it's working well for me. It's really a pitty that the movie industry doesn't get rid of the encryption - it's useless anyways as every single one has been cracked so far. Pirates will always find a way to pirate and the only thing that encryption and DRM really does is ruining the media experience and freedom of paying customers.
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#5
(2016-05-15, 18:28)da-anda Wrote: It's really a pitty that the movie industry doesn't get rid of the encryption - it's useless anyways as every single one has been cracked so far. Pirates will always find a way to pirate and the only thing that encryption and DRM really does is ruining the media experience and freedom of paying customers.
100% agreed.

I have 350 odd DVD's and 410 BD's that cost me somewhere in the region of..., well i don't really want to think about the cost, lets say it's a fair chunk of small car sized change. And yet i can't use the product i have purchased AND own in the way i like.

What's worse is that i'm forced to watch those stupid FBI warnings (we don't have an FBI where i live), short videos equating copywrite violation with smash and grabs thefts from vehicles (which it is not), forced to watch previews to movies (i either own or i'm not interested in owning) most times i put a disc in a player. One does get fed up after some time!

It ended up being such a frustration it drove me to rip many of my DVD's and remove all those PUO and extras i have no interest in. In fact many of the 9GB commercial discs would burn to a 4.9GB disc after removing the crap without needing to compress the movie much (if at all). Such issues highlighted that the movie industry was not reeally concerned with picture quality, especially when BD came about as Sony dropped their superbit DVD format.

So way to go Movie industry, pissing off your paying customer by selling them an inferiour product that inconvieniences them is not such a great move. Fortunately for them i haven't been driven to torrenting my movies like so many....

But once i found out about Kodi, i put my movie DVD rips on HDD in mkv format which gave me the freedom i desired. No more disc swapping, no more PUO's or FBI warnings or other propogander, just viewer frredom and pleasure to watch what i own without being frustrated. True viewing pleasure (and i haven't even tapped into the full cinema experiance that Kodi can offer)

Being forced to do such hoop jumping with DVD, i stayed away from BD until i could excercise my freedom to do what i wanted with what i bought. When BD ripping was possible, i started to buy BD's many BD's. But BD quality in many cases still leaves a lot to be desired. There is no similar superbit BD product, just poor encodings, lots of languages and lots of extras along with an industry desire to resell us the movies we already own. And their current desire is only punctuated by a stronger desire to again upsell us to new format that requires new TV's, video players and sound equipment as we move to 4K - no thanks.

[Edited to update below]

As is, on windows 7 x64, I can now play non BD+ discs. I installed VLC x64 and then added libaacs.dll to "/Program Files/VideoLAN/VLC"and the keydb.cfg file and the vuk file to "User/'me'/appdata/roaming/aacs" (all found on the www). BD+ discs seem a little more problematic as i wasn't able to find a 64bit version of libbdplus.dll (and the x86 version of VLC and these BD related .dll's didn't work for me). Added to the difficulty of no x64 libbdplus.dll is that a later version of the java VM0 component is required for the latest 2016 BD+ titles (and such is still M.I.A.).

Maybe there are some dependancies between dll versions and VLC versions which i don't understand. Such may explain why i had issues with x86 versions. Unfortunately i am not able to build my own windows dll's at the moment.

Oddly, if i install x86 Kodi and then copy the x86 versions of libaacs.dll and x86 version of libbdplus into" /Program Files (86)/Kodi", while keeping "/User/'me'/appdata/roaming/aacs" as before and copying the old java VM0 components into "/User/'me'/appdata/roaming/bdplus/vm0/", i get better luck with Kodi BD playback of old BD+ titles Nod

But at the moment, 'full' BD playback on Windows using free open source software is a moving target because of that P.I.T.A. known as BD+ Confused

I'm yet l to try it on linux (which means a less appliance based OS for Kodi may be the go on my RPi-3)... Big Grin
I'm a XBMC novice :)
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#6
(2016-05-15, 18:28)da-anda Wrote: BD-J is not yet supported, Ace is working on adding it, but it will only ever be as good as whatever libbluray is supporting.

As for the decryption - there is at least no official add-on. Some distros like libreelec come with libaacs and libbdplus (IIRC) and you might be able to get these going and work for your needs. Personally I have a Windows box running AnyDVD-HD and access the bluray drive as network share from all my Kodi boxes. It's ofc not the nicest solution as I have to walk to the Windows box first, but it's working well for me. It's really a pitty that the movie industry doesn't get rid of the encryption - it's useless anyways as every single one has been cracked so far. Pirates will always find a way to pirate and the only thing that encryption and DRM really does is ruining the media experience and freedom of paying customers.

... will the BD-J implementation be part of the upcoming Krypton release?

... would be so cool to have better menu support.
unRAID Server, Pioneer VSX-LX52, Panasonic 65VT30, Marusys VU+ Duo, Zotac AD10
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#7
With MakeMKV its possible to replace libaacs and libbdplus with their own library and use MakeMKV to decrypt the discs while playing the discs in Kodi/vlc. I've found it works well, though I only use on rare occasions where I haven't ripped the disc yet.
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#8
(2016-08-12, 19:13)ix400 Wrote: ... will the BD-J implementation be part of the upcoming Krypton release?

... would be so cool to have better menu support.
I fear not, unless ace finds some time until RC phase to fix the current remaining issues. I think our build system is ready to build libbluray with BD-J support (f.e. on Windows), but the rendering of the BD-J overlays in Kodi needs some more work AFAIK.
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#9
I would donate 1kg chocolate for Ace and 50€ for team Kodi if the BD-J supports makes it into Krypton (libreelec).

No joke!

Ace! Ace! Ace! Ace! Ace! Ace!

:-)
unRAID Server, Pioneer VSX-LX52, Panasonic 65VT30, Marusys VU+ Duo, Zotac AD10
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#10
I find another article also talks about how to play commercial Blu-ray movies on Kodi with detailed information
http://homemediaportal.com/how-to-play-b...with-kodi/
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#11
(2016-08-13, 22:41)ix400 Wrote: I would donate 1kg chocolate for Ace and 50€ for team Kodi if the BD-J supports makes it into Krypton (libreelec).

No joke!

Ace! Ace! Ace! Ace! Ace! Ace!

:-)
@ix400, looks like you should get ready to make that donation of chocolate and money, because Ace have now submitted a pull request to master / Kodi v18 (Leia) which at least adds enables BD-J support on Win32:

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/11836

Note however that this does not mean that encrypted Blu-ray Discs will work out of the box (which would require that also libaacs and libbdplus would be included and enabled which each build of Kodi), see dicussion:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=230493

BDJ support will however bring us one step closer to full Blu-ray Disc support in Kodi.
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#12
@Sunderlandgreen, using a commercial windows based BD playback software like Cyberlink PowerDVD is not really a solution.
Such software is soon depreciated and you are forced to pay for an upgrade every few years just to decrypt and unscramble your new BD titles.

At this time, hardware based players have firmware updates made available as required by new BD decryption schemes.
I've not heard of any hardware based player being depreciated in a similar maner to PC based software players (guess it's just a matter of time).

As i see it the only solution is software based systems built on open source software using title and/or player key files.
The only question is how and where one gets the title/player key files Huh

Oddly, i can use VLC/decryption combo to play back new BD tiltle that my version of Cyberlink wont play (without spending $$ on a cyberlink upgrade).
But this setup is on Windows based system, it doesn't help me on my RPi Sad
Obviously getting new title/player keys is still an issue Huh

Sadly there is no neat solution... even hardware players will likely be forced on a treadmill at some time Confused
Seems it's not enough i spend $$$ per year on buying BD's, the industry still wants control over me and their hands further in my pockets than i prefer Angry
Greedy bastards that they are Nod

@ix400, it's sad that the focus seems to be on Win based OS's and not on open source based OS's like linux.
It's all appreciated in any case and a move in a foward direction.
Hopefully the function will also be ported to linux and thus we will see it working on our RPi's with Leia or soon after Huh
I'm a XBMC novice :)
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#13
@skylarking you can use the 'vlc method' to decrypt bd's in kodi and keys can be found on the net. I don't remember the specifics (and this isn't the place to discuss it) as I now use makemkv + libaacs/libbdplus. Google is your friend.
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#14
(2017-03-22, 04:32)teeedubb Wrote: @skylarking you can use the 'vlc method' to decrypt bd's in kodi and keys can be found on the net. I don't remember the specifics (and this isn't the place to discuss it) as I now use makemkv + libaacs/libbdplus. Google is your friend.
Thanks for the heads up @teeedubb but i'm well aware of how to get around the movie cartels DRM as i mentioned in my previous post Tongue
(2017-03-22, 03:32)skylarking Wrote: :
Oddly, i can use VLC/decryption combo to play back new BD tiltle that my version of Cyberlink wont play (without spending $$ on a cyberlink upgrade).
:
You're correct that this forum is not the place to discuss such DRM circumvention techniques (decryption & unscrambling) which is why i was somewhat obscure as to the exact methods i use in my last post.
Maybe i was not obscure enough in earlier posts. Sorry for that Blush

It would be fair to say my previous post was a gripe against the movie cratel's DRM that simply hinders fair use and forces us to buy more expensive hardware than would otherwise be the case without this DRM bullshit.
And if we use commercial PC based BD playback software (of the clearly legal kind like PowerDVD) then we are forced to periodically pay $$ just to watch our newly purchased movies.
Our only other solution is to chase our tails trying to find keys on the web should we go for free opensource software like VLC or Kodi, or hope that the cartel's don't seize our favorite backup software domains as was teh case with DVDFab.
It's a loose loose proposition, either spend $$ or spend time chasing your tail looking for keys, etc.

I must say it's odd how multinationals are protected by governments while syphoning billions of tax $$ out of an economy via low tax juristictions but Antigua was jumped on for using it's WTO exemption to ignore US copywrite Huh
(I think it was Antigua that registered the companies that brough us what the cartel likes to call circumvention technology).
It's your politicians at work - the phrase is 'lobbying' not 'bribery' Wink
It's an odd world indeed Nod

Still i hope Kodi fully implements everything required to play back of polycarbonite BD's (excluding actual keys obviously).

Curious if it is even possible to write a binary addon (from the makers of our favorite backup software) that would handle AACS decryption & BD+ unscrambling within Kodi?
Such an addon would hopefully negate the need to periodically find keys and it would hopefully be outside of Kodi's responsability.
I'm a XBMC novice :)
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#15
Ace have now posted in this other thread that he / Team Kodi are considering including libaacs and libbdplus with Kodi master / builds:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=230493

(2017-03-23, 06:53)skylarking Wrote: Curious if it is even possible to write a binary addon (from the makers of our favorite backup software) that would handle AACS decryption & BD+ unscrambling within Kodi?
Such an addon would hopefully negate the need to periodically find keys and it would hopefully be outside of Kodi's responsability.
While inclusing the libaacs and libbdplus alone does not enable playback of encrypted Blu-ray Discs, having them shipped with Kodi builds does however mean that Kodi would at least include all the binaries needed to playback encrypted Blu-ray Discs, but users still need to install/provide the keys, (and since the keys are only text so something that could then be done through an Python script addon for BD keys, or manually).

Some info on the requestiorement of such a Python script addon for for BD key is posted in that other thread here:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=230493

(2015-06-25, 15:21)RockerC Wrote:
(2015-06-25, 14:33)da-anda Wrote: these libs are fine to ship as they don't do anything without any key files
Correct, these libaacs and libbdplus libraries alone does not decrypt AACS encrypted Blu-ray Disc media and ISOs without additional components (keys), as you would still require to either separately add keys yourself or use a yet an additional library or application such as aacskeys which can download or generate a AACS key on demand.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Blu-ray
http://www.labdv.com/aacs/
http://www.labdv.com/aacs/KEYDB.cfg

Though again as Kodi already comes with libdvdcss which decrypts CCS encrypted DVD-Video media I don't see why not could could not also include aacskeys as well to generate AACS keys, but that could otherwise be solved with an addon or third-party application

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/aacskeys/
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=123311
http://cyberside.net.ee/ripping/BD_DeviceKeys/

Also checkout http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=173474&page=6

"I've created a free database of AACS keys and and open-source software to keep local KEYDB.cfg files up-to-date.

I've initialized the database with 998 keys: KEYDB.cfg

You can download AACS Updater source code and hack some paths (looking for #if defined(WIN32)).

Project page: http://www.labdv.com/aacs/ "
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