The Blu Ray Disc or BD, is an optical storage disc made of plastic. It is 1.2 mm in thickness and 120 mm in diameter. The BD drive uses a blue laser to read the disc, and hence the name Blu Ray is given to this disc technology which was specifically designed to supersede DVD technology. A BD can come with single, dual, triple or quadruple layers with a capacity of 25 GB, 50 GB, 100 GB and 128 GB respectively. Triple and quadruple layer Blue Ray discs are basically made for BD-XL Blu Ray rewrite drives. These discs are not used by movie production companies for distributing their movies. Moreover, most of the BD players owned by consumers today would not be able to access the additional layers anyway. Even new players would require an update of firmware in order to be able to access triple and quadruple layers.
VLC or the VideoLan Client is one of the most popular media players used in personal computers today. Written by the VideoLan project, it is an open source, free media player cum multimedia framework. It supports a number of video and audio codecs, file formats, discs and streaming protocols. It is available for a variety of different platforms and computer operating systems. Many people wish to play their BD movies using their VLC player on their computer.
There is only one official way to play BD supported by Windows. You need to use a commercial software application like CyberLink PowerDVD for the purpose. Computers that come with a BD pre-installed would have a similar software application available. Even when people purchase the drive separately, the drive would most often come with the necessary software to play BDs. Continue reading »