I decided to connect with my inner 13 year old and bought Army of Darkness on Blu-Ray. Like the rest of my video collection, my goal was to rip it to my NAS so it's available on my Kodi box; I don't own a blu-ray player, only Blu-ray optical drives for computers. But, I decided I wanted to just pop the movie in and play it on my PC, should look pretty good on my gaming monitor.
No machine in my inventory would play it from the disc. VLC and the one or two other media players in Fedora's pathetic excuse for a repository would play it. VLC would throw an error and tell you to look in the log for details...wherever the log is. Side note: I'm not going to see log for details if you don't give me a link or path to that log. We hold up VLC as the best media player but it can barely play mp3 and mp4 files from the local machine, it doesn't work across a network, it doesn't read optical discs, it doesn't give useful errors and I'm not looking up how to read its logs for more details.
So, several rounds of troubleshooting across a few computers later, I finally get a setup where MakeMKV will rip it from the goddamn disc. And what does the 1080p version of the movie get you? Film grain. Noisy hideous distracting film grain. Exporting it as a 720p video made it look better because crushing the resolution evened out the film grain.
Is this what liking movies is like these days? I don't think I want to like movies anymore.
The problem with VLC is not that it can't play certain formats, but that the version of VLC shipping with Fedora is missing certain codecs.
Fedora is not allowed to include them for legal reasons, so you have to install them yourself.
This is a huge pain for the average user, but distros cannot really do anything about it.
You could try fixing the codecs using rpmfusion or alternatively install VLC as a Flatpak.
I DID install it from Flatpak. And it seems that Blu-Ray is an extra special pain in the ass. MakeMKV was talking about how it can work as a codec plugin for blu-ray decode in other media players including VLC and then there's no instructions anywhere on how, so no it can't. I'm just...convinced VLC isn't as good as everyone says it is.
Why will VLC on my phone play mp4 files from my NAS but VLC on my desktop won't when mpv will?
Haven't actually done this with Flatpak, but I know it can be a pain.
I see flathub lists an makemkv add-on for VLC - is that installed? I'm not sure what codecs the VLC flatpak even includes or if it suffers from the same licensing restrictions.
So...
I got the DVD to rip in MakeMKV on my old computer running Mint. I cannot get MakeMKV to work as a decoder for VLC on that machine; there's no documentation that walks you through how to do that, everyone in their forums talks in links to other threads, I'm going to assume that flatpak CAN'T work because flatpak. It does recognize discs on that machine though and can rip them. That makemkv addon flatpak shows up in Fedora's software manager but not on Mint's. It seems to do nothing.
On my Fedora machine, neither MakeMKV nor Handbrake seem to function at all. Neither of those applications seem to be able to interact with the disc drive in any way. VLC can play ordinary DVDs, so the drive is functioning and talking to the OS. MakeMKV either seems to work normally if you launch it without the optical drive attached or with it empty of discs, the second you put a disc in it spools a thread up and then just hangs forever. DVD drive isn't doing anything. Doesn't matter if it's a DVD or a blu-ray. Handbrake just doesn't do anything, there's nothing you can do to select the optical drive as a source. Just sits there with it's tongue in its ass waiting for a round of applause.
Neither app is available from Fedora's repos as a .rpm. Nothing ever is. Neither app offers instructions for compiling on Fedora. Nothing ever does. If you try to follow the compile instructions for Debian substituting apt-get install for dnf install, inevitably the packages it wants aren't in the repos. Because nothing ever is. I'm distro hopping tomorrow.