[TaterSalad]

I don't understand something about Blu-ray in XBMC. We have this plugin that, from the source, looks like it just pipes the largest track in the mounted Blu-ray disc or iso to makemkv and sends that video stream output to the player.

Alternatively without the plugin, you can manually mount your Blu-ray iso in Linux. Browse to the largest track yourself, and hit play. XBMC recognizes the file and plays it natively (as of Dharma), without the plugin.

So I guess my question is, why do we need this plugin? DRM and Blu-ray menu issues aside, it seems that XBMC can handle Blu-ray content ever since libbluray was integrated into Dharma. If that's true, why does XBMC not play the largest track from the .iso directly? (You have to go through the process of manually mounting it from the command line and browsing to the specific track before anything will actually play.) I would expect the function to work the same as handling a DVD .iso minus all of the menu functions.

Don't get me wrong. I think this plugin is a great solution for people who want Blu-ray in XBMC, so more power to you. But from an architectural standpoint, I think it's headed in the wrong direction. This shouldn't be built in as a plugin. It's awkward and cumbersome to navigate through plugin menus just to get a local video file to play. It should be able to play the iso directly from the XBMC Library natively.

I know XBMC developers are working hard to implement Blu-ray support into XBMC. And it seems the hard part (decoding the video and playing it properly) is finished. All that lacks is preping the iso or mount so that the video can be played from the Video Library. Shouldn't this be a simple integration?

Perhaps I am missing something. And I hope I didn't step on any toes in saying this. I know everyone hates the guy that says "When will we have X?" or "Why don't we have Y?" while contributing nothing. Those aren't my intentions. I am just genuinely curious.