How to play Blu-Rays?

The VCR King

Well-Known Member
My gaming PC has a BD-ROM drive and it will load and recognize Blu-Ray discs, but I have tried playing them in Windows Media Player, VLC, Media Center, and InterActual Player, but all of them say I need a codec to play the BD movie. Does anyone know of a (FREE) program I can use to play my discs?
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
You should have received software with your drive such as PowerDVD (which has a blu-ray component).
 

Origin Saint

Well-Known Member
You should have received software with your drive such as PowerDVD (which has a blu-ray component).

I thought this too, when I purchased my ASUS Blu-Ray drive, turns out I got nothing but driver install and that was it. From my understanding, most, if not all, Blu-Ray drives do not come with software to read the Blu-Rays, and require external, 3rd party software such as VLC Player, CyberLink PowerDVD, ArcSoft Total Media, etc...

The best, and only free bet that I know of is VLC Player, although when I tried getting that to work a few years ago I never could.
 

spirit

Moderator
Staff member
You should have received software with your drive such as PowerDVD (which has a blu-ray component).
Sometimes if you buy OEM or open box Blu-Ray drives, like my last one, they don't come with any software for playing Blu-Rays. The first one I bought was a retail drive and that came with PowerDVD 9 but it didn't work on Windows 8, so I ended up buying 12 Pro which I still use today.

I started a thread about free BR playback software years ago and several different options were suggested, take a look at my thread: http://www.computerforum.com/threads/free-blu-ray-playback-software.220266/ hopefully everything there is still relevant, looks like 'DAPlayer' might be worth a look (check for viruses/spyware/malware first though, I remember WinX distributing dodgy software).

It seems there might not be a lot of options to be honest and PowerDVD isn't really very expensive. I believe WinDVD is another commercial alternative.
 
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