I’ve been wanting to do this for a while now, but I finally took the hour or so to actually do it.

Blurays on Linux are a little messy. They don’t always work, and even when you get the KEYDB for VLC to pull the information, not all disks work. But at least this project of mine should save you the step of finding the keys.

What happened

I used to use a site called “whoknowsmy.name” to get the AACS and KEYSDB.cfg files, but recently had to update after a system reinstall, since the database hadn’t been updated since 2018. I found this new site, http://fvonline-db.bplaced.net/, that seems to update every day or so. Since this site seemed more promising, I decided to use it as the base of my script.

I started making the Timer file. It wasn’t too difficult, and I was able to complete it without any hiccups, thanks to the Arch Wiki. Next came the Service file, which took a little bit longer, but once I settled on a seperate script, I also completed it. The Arch Wiki page wasn’t super helpful, so I looked at some of the other, pre-existing files on my system, like SSHD.Service and SMBD.Service.

Last came the script. I knew I wanted something small, but would catch most usecases, including mine, which is a little weird. At first I thought Python would be a good way to go, but when I realized wget would be faster and easier than the Python requests package, I went with a simple Bash script.

After squashing a couple of bugs with the syntax, I can confirm it works like a charm. I wrote a small Install script to install the files to their respective locations, and now it’s basically ready for consumption. I would like to add a small check to verify if wget and unzip are installed, but that’s something small that can be added in the next couple of days.

Another thing I would like to see is for something like this to be actually packaged in the Ubuntu repositories or the AUR. It would make it a lot easier for users who want to play Blurays disks on their computers… though let’s be honest; there aren’t many of those in 2021.

Thanks for reading!