Blu-ray DRM is really devilish. I use a program called makemkv to rip them, because there is no other way to play them on my laptop, and there are no legit linux options for blu-ray playback, you have to crack the drm to play them. The easiest solution is makemkv to rip the movies into files, it works out of the box.
But if the level of drm (aacs) on a particular blu-ray is higher than what Makemkv can handle, the disk will update the firmware on your drive to revoke access to makemkv, so it can't access any blu-rays.
"One famous “feature” of AACS is a so-called host revocation. It was designed to ensure that only “approved” software can use your drive. Every Blu-ray disc contains a file that has a list of host keys known to be used by "unauthorized" software. This list has a version number. The moment you insert the disc into your drive, the drive checks if the list is newer than the one it knows about, and if it is, the drive re-flashes itself (updates firmware)."
And that happened to me. It was a blu-ray of the 1972 Hammer horror movie Fear in the Night that did it. The one program that works with my blu-ray player now couldn't access any discs, including ones it had ripped before. And there are absolutely zero linux programs that are authorized to playback blu-ray discs.
I had to flash my drive's firmware to allow something called libredrive, which allows direct access to files and bypasses the aacs drm firmware.
And that was quite the journey. I had makemkv installed as a flatpak via my distro's software manager. and I needed to use the command line. Flatpaks are a great packaging format. but they are primarily for gui apps. So i had to build makemkv from source. And then I had to figure out the commandline for the firmware flashing tool included with makemkv, which was hard because the instructions linked flat out lie. There is no "flash" command for sdftools, there is only "rawflash", you have to read the thread carefully to find that out. This page helped. I had to download new patched libredrive firmware.
And finally i figured out the command I needed ""sdftool -d [drive name] rawflash main,enc -i [new firmware file name].bin. And now I can use my blu-ray drive again. It's now libredrive.
So much work to finally be able to use the drive I paid for, and the blu-ray discs I also paid for. I'm not running some major piracy operation, I just want to be able to watch movies I legally own on my laptop. And drm stopped me, and I had to break it.
This is why DRM is so bad, and anyone who uses it deserves all the piracy they are trying to stop with it. It's scummy to take someone's money and then interfere with their ability to use the copy of the products they own and paid for. It's such atrocious treatment of the customer that anyone who does it deserves to have their stuff pirated.
