Blu-ray
Media Center supports playback and ripping of Blu-ray.
Requirements
MC supports unencrypted Blu-Ray playback. To play encrypted Blu-ray discs, which includes most commercially released discs, a 3rd-party Blu-Ray decrypter is required. AnyDVD HD is a popular choice.
makeMKV can also be used. MC28 supports ripping BD, using makeMKV.
Playback
Insert a disc and the program will offer to play it. If you have a ripped copy of the Blu-Ray disc, you can Import it and Media Center will play it.
Media Center supports title selection, chapters, audio stream selection, subtitle selection, and a variety of other playback options.
Ripping
You can rip Blu-Ray using Action Window > Rip Disc inside the program.
- See also: Ripping and Blu-ray Ripping
Metadata and Managing Multi-Part Discs
Media Center will automatically look up cover art, descriptions, directors, actors, genres and other metadata for your imported discs and rips using the Automatic Metadata Lookup system. If it doesn't find the movie automatically, just fix the Name field in MC and right-click > Get Movie & TV Info.
If your disc consists of multiple titles, such as alternative endings, TV episodes, or music videos, you can manage this within Media Center using Particles.
HD Audio
Media Center is capable decoding the full range of audio codecs used on commercial Blu-ray Discs itself, while preserving their full bitrate and audio bit depth. This includes HD audio codecs such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, which MC can read and decompress losslessly.
We recommend that you use Media Center to decode HD audio because this gives you access to the full power of MC's audio engine, including VideoClock, DSPs, and MC's powerful Volume system.
- Please Note: Versions of MC prior to 20.0.100 did not include the LAV DTS decoder capable of decoding DTS-HD Master Audio. For older versions of MC, please see the Arcsoft DTS Decoder article.
You can check that TrueHD or DTS-HD is being decoded properly using Audio Path.
Bitstreaming
If you prefer Media Center also supports bitstreaming. You can enable bitstreaming via HDMI connection in:
- Tools > Options > Audio > Settings > Bitstreaming.
- Note: SPDIF connections cannot carry HD Audio formats.
Bitstreaming bypasses the entire Media Center audio engine, including things like the Volume controls, and the decoder on the far end of the HDMI cable is responsible for decoding the audio.
Menus
MC uses its own OSD to provide access the to the content on Blu-Ray discs such as:
- titles
- chapters
- audio, video, and subtitle stream selection
However, MC does not support the Java or BDMV menus included with many commercial discs, as there is no currently available open decoder required for this support. To watch your movies in the highest quality, you don't need them, though! To access the menu press the Up/Down arrow keys or right click on the playing video.
Forced Subtitles
MC will automatically display any subtitle track that is marked as "forced" when the disk was authored. Forced subtitles are often used for bits of non-native language which audience isn't be expected to understand, in a movie that is otherwise in their native tongue (elven or alien speech, a little Spanish in an English language movie, etc). Unfortunately, many disks are authored with these subtitles in a separate track and in these cases the user will need to select the correct track (normally towards the bottom of the subtitle list). MC will remember this selection for the next time the BD is played.
3D BD
Most commercial 3D BD disks use a version of AVC encoding called "multiview video coding (MVC)". MC does not support MVC and all such 3D BD disks will play as 2D. For more information on how to use a 3rd party player for these disks refer to this thread on Interact.
NOTE: As of Media Center 21 Build 21.0.65 3D Blu-ray playback is supported, if your system meets all requirements. See this thread for details of requirements: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,103931.0.html
If your system does not meet all requirements, the method described in the first thread linked above can still be used to launch an external player to view 3D content.
Blu Ray Menus
Supports for BluRay menus has been added in MC24, see https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,114628.0.html for details.
More
- Refer to Audio Setup for information on configuring your sound output.
- Please see Matt's description of Blu-ray support in MC16. MC 16 and later can play Blu-ray discs or rips.
- LAV Support for DTS-HD MA
- Blu-ray support of encrypted discs requires AnyDVD HD or equivalent to read the disc.
- For older versions, please read these threads on Interact:
- Mojave on audio mixing for Blu-ray: "JRiver does anything AC3Filter does, but better. JRiver does everything in its 64-bit audio path and makes sure that the highest quality is maintained. I removed AC3Filter a long time ago."
- You can also Extract Audio from Video Files.