I recently upgraded my HTPC’s optical drive to Blu-Ray (primarily for The Force Awakens). The DRM on Blu-Rays is problematic when you’ve built your own player – you can’t just stick the disc in and hit the play button like you can with DVDs. I’m using MakeMKV1 which lets you rip Blu-Rays for encoding with Handbrake, but I don’t really have the storage to be ripping Blu-Rays on an ongoing basis. Fortunately, MakeMKV also allows a disc to be streamed over UPnP, which Kodi supports natively.

To make this a bit more usable, I’m using a script to launch the stream with MakeMKV’s CLI interface, wait until the UPnP share is ready, then switch Kodi to the share ready to select the title from the disc.

I’m using the Advanced Launcher addon for Kodi to create a launcher for disc_trigger.sh. I’ve created a Favourite for the launcher and added it to the main menu. Now the process is:

  • Insert disc
  • Activate launcher
  • Wait until it’s ready
  • Select title and watch
  1. MakeMKV is proprietary, but free-as-in-beer as it’s in “perpetual beta”. You do however need to keep updating the beta registration code, so I paid for a license as I want this to be “setup and forget”.