Something that I found out that I didn’t know about before is MakeMKVCon. As the name indicates this is a binary that lets you run everything from the console. So with the simple command ./makemkvcon stream disc:0 you can stream your movie over an http server. Just point our browser to http://localhost:51000 to find the right vob or .ts file you are looking for and launch it in vlc or another application that can stream over http.

The advantages of running it from the console is it makes it able for your to integrate it with a script. So that brings me to the second part of this post. Getting the blu-ray player to stream directly to plex without having to copy it to your hard drive first. Which in my opinion is great since I have a small hard drive. Unfortunately I don’t have a working script yet. It’s about 50% there. just have to finish learning the other parts of the plex plug-in api. Once when its done I’ll be posting back here so keep checking back.

One thing I found interesting and didn’t understand why at first is why the MakeMKV people would want to use an HTTP server to stream the files. seemed like a lot of added complexity when there are other ways to stream the output just as easily. Looking at the HTTP headers it mentioned UPnP. So that was a nice surprise. Once when all the UPnP stuff is completed you should be able to play these files in plex or xbmc a lot easier.

So you have a mac and you have a Blu-Ray drive. But you can’t figure out how to get them to work with each other. Well unfortunately for us sad folks Apple has not been very supportive of the Blu-Ray platform for what ever reason. Fortunately for us though we have people out there in the open source and hacking community that are really smart and have made it possible. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as inserting your disc and pressing play. But it can be done and it isn’t all that hard.

You will need two pieces of software in order to make this work. MakeMKV and Plex (I personally prefer Plex over XBMC. But they should both work nicely).

The first application you will have to use is MakeMKV. It is rather straight forward. First you need to set up the infomation it needs to decrypt a Blu-Ray drive. Go to you preferences and click on the BD+ tab. You will see two areas. One asking for a SVQ file and another asking for a location to save your BD+ debug dumps.

The SVQ file is a special file you have to download from MakeMKV that has all the special codes to decrypt your disc. If by chance they don’t have the code for your disc yet. You can email your BD+ dump file to svq@makemkv.com and with in a few days you can download the SVQ and rip your disc.

After you have all that setup you can open your disc in MakeMKV and it’ll scan the structure of the disc and allow you to export different video, audio and subtitle tracks to an MKV you can play in plex. The only bad part to this solution is you have to rip it to your hard drive. It would be nice if you could just play it from the disc saving time and space.

I prefer to play it in plex because it seems the playback is a lot smoother than VLC and MPlayer. Although I haven’t tested the new builds of MPlayer lately.

let me know if you run into any problems trying to get this to work. Like I said before this works great when you want to watch a show on your mac in 1080p.