Or am I just too retarded to use modern technology?

Back in september, I built my own PC, and commited the grave error of going with a Blu ray/DVD writer instead of just a trusty normal dvd drive. All I did back then to see if it worked was to pop in a DVD, since I hadn't any blu rays at home.

This day I finally wanted to try out one of these newfangled blu rays with HD and whatnot, I popped it in and lo and behold, windows media player refused to play it.

Fair enough, I finally bothered to download VLC player. got errors about missing libraries and whatnot . Updated the reader firmware. Same shit. Downloaded libraries and applied some some fixes. Nope, VLC player won't play any blu rays for me.

Well, okay. So I downloaded a totally legit copy of PowerDVD for which I surely spent 50€ on, and here's the real kicker: playing blu rays is not allowed on analog monitors. What the fuck.

So now I have a blu ray disc, a blu ray player, and can't use them because i lack an expensive piece of bloated software and an overpriced monitor.

Is there anything I can do to actually watch this thing without spending a single cent more, or has the time come to finally learn how to make bombs and make Sony pay for all it's crimes againts humanity?

Christ, my blood is boiling right now. I might have been gullible enough to just assume this shit would work just like any normal dvd, but this is pretty much the most retarded, punishing and straight up ultrafascist DRM I've ever seen.

Yup, Blu-Ray playback traditionally requires licensed software. There are some other workarounds you may try, however:

http://lifehacker.com/5806252/how-can-i-play-blu+ray-discs-on-my-computer

welcome to the wonderful world of DRM. your entire system must be protected if your monitor has a DVI port and it's less than 48months old it likely has the keys needed but ONLY if you use DVI, HDMI or displayport.

seriously though if your monitor has any of the above 3 why the hell are you using VGA?!?!

Welcome to DRM in video playback. You should see the tech in those things, 90% of it is DRM, it's why they're so slow too. They literally have virtual machines running other virtual machines. You think you're pissed because you don't have an encrypted path now, wait until they downgrade the picture quality for "free" because they don't like your path.

DVD, as bad as it was, was nothing more than shitty copy protection. BluRay is actual DRM, as in, they can revoke keys if they really want to.

Look, if you spent money on actual BluRay software, I'm sorry, the only money you should have had to spend was on Slysoft's AnyDVD with the HD option, which will bypass much of this bullshit for you...

There's a trial version.

That's the reason why many don't bother with it - too much hassle...

The only "good" about the blues is that you can backup 25/50 GB of data.

If vlc doesn't work, and you don*t won't to rip the whole disc, makemkv has an option to let you stream it directly, then use VLC to pick up the stream.

Good info, but that's way too low level when someone is frustrated. Yes, he should know about it, eventually. Let's get him up and running first;)

Yeah, blu-ray utterly sucks. I can only hope that the next format to come along has nothing to do with Sony.

Well, one can hope - but as long as the same guys enforcing the same regime, we're pretty much sc¤¤¤!

GOG and CDprojekt really need to start 2 new websites...

GOMU - DRM free music

and

GOMO - DRM free movies

Alright. I'm pretty tech savvy, but this stuff is such a PITA it's easier to let someone else deal with the constant updates and headaches, Slysoft may be on a subscription model now, not sure, they kept threatening it back in the day, but I have lifetime keys for almost all their products, they are literally that easy. If you decide to try again from disk, I highly recommend giving AnyDVD HD a shot (this one removes copy protection and DRM on the fly as you do anything with the disk, which is super cool as your ripping program, or playback program doesn't even see the encryption, it's removed before it gets there!).

The game one is probably less useful now than it used to be.

You didn't just censor 'screwed', did you?

In any case, with Sony it probably took a long time before they could even agree that for the format to succeed they'd have to make it available to people not watching blu-rays on a Sony player with a Sony TV. Sony love their proprietary formats, which means you either have to stick with them religiously for all your hardware needs or avoid them like the plague.

For the last decade or more the latter option has looked to be by far the best.

I did, but normally I don't use such words, only when I'm alittle frustrated about drm's. Guess my censoring comes from watching movies and youtube videos.

Sony is a big player on the market with alot of subcontractors and connections, it didn't surprise me when they won the format war that went on, some years ago.

No surprise at all. Not when the entire purpose behind the PS3 was originally to promote the blu-ray format. They were selling it at such a loss that it was actually cheaper than other players on the market that lacked the whole 'console bit'. Someone once said something along the lines of 'to win a war you need three things: money, money and more money'.