I was looking for a good free Blu-Ray player for Windows 7, and I was wondering if any of you knew of any.
I’ve been installing the K-Lite Codec Pack on all my systems for years. It includes all the codecs I need to play anything I run on my computers, and has Media Player Classic which takes the lightweight, minimalist approach of… Well… The classic Media Player I knew and loved from Windows 98.
Word of warning
If you try it be sure to pay attention during the installation. Because it’s free I think it will offer to install some toolbar or change your browser’s homepage.
As I understand it K-lite with MPC will not play encrypted Blu-Rays (i.e. everything professionally authored).
Decrypting a Blu-Ray requires an additional piece of software which will inevitably be in breach of DCMA.
Yes. At some point, someone has to pay a license fee for BR/DCMA, and be of sufficiently good corporate moral character to stand behind the proper integration and use of that technology. (That is, Ivan T. Kracker can’t use the decryptor and subvert DCMA to provide a video extractor.) So it’s going to cost the maker, and that means it’s going to cost the end user.
But the unencrypted stuff plays with K-lite, AFAIK. (I have the full Adobe suite installed so haven’t needed freeware video stuff for a while.)
As it stands, there are no “good” free soft Blu-ray player. As the poster above mentioned, someone has to pay the BD licensing fees. Another poster mentioned that MPC will not play commercial (i.e. encrypted) Blu-rays and they are correct. Blu-rays need to be decrypted before MPC can play them.
The only way to play commercial Blu-rays without paying for a software player is to use VLC with a simple tweak. The legality of this tweak seems to be in the grey zone so you can google it and decide for yourself. This method will play commercial Blu-rays, but not all of them, especially ones with new encrypted title keys.