Hello

I am looking at getting an external blu-ray optical drive, in order to be able to read/play and burn blu-ray discs.

I am a bit concerned about how well it will work. My concern can be summed up into two points:

1. The compatibility of external blu-ray burner drives with Linux, hardware-wise.
2. The degree of support in software in Linux for reading, playing and burning blu-ray discs.

I am thinking of getting one of these two external drives, should they work with Linux?

Asus BW-16D1H-U Pro
https://www.asus.com/ae-en/Optical-D..._PRO/overview/

Buffalo BRXL-16U3-EU
http://www.buffalo-technology.com/en...blu-ray-drive/

What is your experience on support for blu-ray (drives & software) in Linux?
Does it generally work quite well, or are problems common?

Thanks for your help

1. Shouldn't be an issue. They're pretty much all going to be USB 3.0, and recognized as an optical drive. I've used several, and none of them ever had an issue being recognized even in older 3.16 (Jessie) kernels.
2. THIS will be your issue. Blu-Ray support in linux is iffy, at best.

This article from the Arch Wiki may be helpful: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Blu-ray

I am back some results:

I got the Asus BW-16D1H-U Pro external drive and it works fine.
It is detected by the operating system, I have played a dvd, burned a blu-ray data-disc and read it back with the drive. No problems at all. I'm using Fedora 26.
I tested burning about 20 GB of data, each file was about ~1.4 GB in size. Here's the K3b log of the burn: https://pastebin.com/iezje90w

Something I am uncertain of is the support for multi-layer blu-ray discs, i.e. double, triple, quad (50, 100, 128GB discs). I have no such discs so I can't perform any tests.

K3b, the burning application I used, is a little unclear on what blu-ray disc formats that are supported. I think K3b might also support burning double-layer blu-ray discs.

2 members found this post helpful.

Just about any external drive will work. Software for burning Blu Ray is something else.
I use a program called silicon, it allows just about everything you want to do with a drive.
k3b will not burn blu ray without a added package.
Good Luck!













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1 members found this post helpful.

I was searching for this topic and what to add something.

You may have problems with BlueRay if you don't have DeCSS (for encrypted DVD), I installed a new system because had an issue with an upgrade. And forget to install DeCSS.
And when I've tried to run DVD on BlueRay I was not able to play DVD (and didn't knew why) it also crashed my system when inserted DVD and reboot.

Installing DeCSS solved the issue, and I had no issues in playing DVD on BlueRay.

Which has nothing to do with bluray, CSS is not used on bluray discs. You would encounter the same thing trying to play a copy protected DVD on a DVD-ROM or DVD-RW etc drive.

But it's used if you try to play DVD on Bluray I've thought that my drive is not supported. But it was a problem with DeCSS.
When tried in DVD drive it didn't crashed the system.