I have a preference for physical media. There's many reasons, some related to the sentiment of owning vs. renting content. Along the same lines, streaming services and service providers can change the terms of service and you have little to no control over it. Westworld is an example of that. One day, HBO decided to pull it from its streaming service and physical copies were the only way you could watch it.
Anyway, on to my most recent experience trying to play a Blu-Ray disc on my PC.
The other day I decided to sit down to watch an episode of Westworld. Usually, I get the DVD version. In this case though, I had the Blu-Ray.
I have an external Blu-Ray player so I thought, "Great! Let me just plug that into my laptop and start the show".
Wrong!
What I thought was a simple task, ended up taking me about 20 minutes to figure out and even then I got to a subpar solution.
I prefer playing media either with MPV or VLC.
At first, it wouldn't play so I decided to go online and figure out why. Turns out, that's not supported out of the box and to get it working you need to download an additional DLL and configure a few things in the VLC settings.
I could've gone through that process, but I just wanted to watch a show. There's got to be an easier way.
Next, I turned to the built-in Media Player in Windows. No luck there either.
I ended up going with the Leawo Blu-Ray player. Although it's free, you have to deal with pop-ups prompting you to upgrade to the paid version. It works though.
I would prefer to use VLC or the built-in media player but it's unfortunate using them isn't as straightforward. Now that I have some more time, I'll set up VLC so that next time, it can "just work".
I'll close it out with a question.
How do you watch Blu-Rays on your PC?
Send me a message and let me know.