How To Play 4k Blu Ray On Pc 2019

I've got AnyDVD HD, and a 4k Friendly LG Blu-Ray drive with the old friendly firmware.
I kinda sorta got a 4k blu-ray to play with Leawo player, but the playback was not smooth, totally unacceptable. B ut it **DID** play the 4-K disc. So I know my drive is OK.

VLC wil play regular 1080p blu-rays just fine on my system- but I get an error from VLC when I try to play a 4K blu-ray...

I am now ripping a 4K blu-ray disc to an .ISO file, that seems to be working fine, so again it seems my LG blu-ray drive is "friendly enough" and AnyDVD HD has decrypted the disc OK.

Now if only I could get VLC to play the discs! I am guessing I need to add some library or something.

Any help would be appreciated.
Wrong section, the UHD section is reserved for decryption related problems only. It is not meant for fixing playback behavior with third party software. Topic moved.
According to VideoLAN.org's website the VLC player has internal CODECs and will play everything out there today, inclusively; including 4K video without any extra wants or warrants...
However, will your computer handle it is the question? What is your computer specs, first off?

Since I am not a mind reader...here are some questions to ponder:

Do you have the LATEST firmware update for your current Blu-Ray player installed to your drive? (Check LG's site -- you stated that you have old firmware.) Depending upon how old your drive is there may not be any...

Does your "built-in" monitor of your notebook support 4K display?

Does your TV/Monitor support 4K viewing (I am thinking yes, is the correct answer for the first part of this question) ***AND*** do you have an HDMI cable that supports 4K output ***AND*** does your HDMI output video card port SUPPORT 4K output?

Next, goto CODEC Guide's website and download the latest MEGA package for the latest video drivers. VideoLAN (VLC) usually uses its own internal CODECs, however, you stated that you had issues during playback, so why not try using MPC (Media Player) which is included within the MEGA package that you can download from the CODEC Guide. I am not saying you cannot use VLC to playback your movie. I am merely suggesting that you stated you had issues playing back your 4K movie, and with the CODEC MEGA package installed you can tweak these CODECs to work with your system while playing back your movie via MPC which uses EXTERNAL CODECs rather than relying only on VLCs INTERNAL only CODECs. Try playing your Blu-Ray again this time using the MPC player and your Blu-Ray drive. Maybe you will have better luck with no errors.

Second, ripping an ISO of your 4K disc is fine, however, now you are relying on your computer's CPU to not only process your video output but now playing your movie from an ISO file you're asking your computer to computer to decompile and play your movie as well. If your graphics card is integrated onto your motherboard with little or no G-RAM or separate GPU processor to help relieve the main CPU's processing of the 4K movie playback, you are going to have an even more choppy playback than you did when you were allowing solely on the Blu-Ray player to process the playback of your 4k movie. Does this make any sense to you, I hope?

Example:

If your movie has a lot of action sequences where things are being blown up and people are dying that takes a lot of processing power for a computer to decompile, send it to the video card and have the video memory and card send its output to the monitor or to your 4K TV. However, if the 4K movie you are viewing and trying to see is of a nature film where your following the migration of penguins and how they give birth, then your computer will not need to process all those extra special EFX because there will not be much EFX in a nature film as opposed to an action film...

Hope this helps...

Cheers!
Computer - Windows 10/64 Intel i7-6800k 6 core / 12 thread clocked to 4.2 GHz, 16 GB 1500 MHz DDR4 RAM, 512 GB M.2 SSD, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 w/ 4 GB RAM
Display - 40 inch Samsung MU6290 which is a 4K HDR capable display.
I have no problems watching 4K / HDR video from Amazon, Netflix or YouTube on the setup.

Since I posted this question I found that VLC will play some 4K blu-rays readily, although it complains about Java being absent so it won't support the disc's menu system (however, Java IS installed and the JAVA_HOME environment variable is properly set in Windows, but even so VLC complains there is no Java....)

Some 4k Blu-Rays play just fine and some - for instance the 4k reissue of 2001 only produce error messages from VLC.

I copied an .ISO from the 2001 4k Blu-Ray and VLC will play that OK, but it won't play the actual disc. ( VLC still complaints about Java and no menu, though it does play the movie from the .ISO just fine. )

All something of a mystery.
@Noirist , You definitely do NOT want to load the latest firmware for your Blu Ray drive as that will likely cause it to lose it's UHD-friendliness.
At best, you could load in the latest firmware that is documented to be UHD-friendly.

But if the drive is reading UHD's already as you stated, I wouldn't change the firmware at all.

T
You are 100% correct, I certainly will NOT be changing that firmware! No no no. This (older) firmware is what makes the drive "friendly" - the drive can read the encrypted data off the disc, and then AnyDVD can de-crypt it. The Movie Nazis made LG put code in later versions of that firmware that would prevent the drive from doing ANYTHING with an encrypted 4K Blu-Ray.
I currently have three issues I am working to resolve:
- Why will VLC play some 4k Blu-Ray movies from the disc, but not play others from the disc but WILL play them from an .ISO image made of the disc?
- Even though Java is installed on my machine, and the environment variable JAVA_HOME is correctly set to the \bin location of Java, why does VLC tell me "The menu for this disc uses Java and Java is not found" - I tried 32 bit VLC with 32 bit Java and 64 bit VLC with 64 bit Java, changing the JAVA_HOME value as appropriate of course, and it made no difference. There is talk on the VLC forums about this. It's possibly a bug in VLC; I am looking for a workaround.
- I don't think that HDR is working. My video card is HDMI 2.0 compliant, and you need HDMI 2.0a at a minimum for HDR AFAIK. So I think I will be buying an NVIDIA GTX 1050ti which has HDMI 2.0b. For sure, my 40 inch Samsung 4K TV display does support HDR
@Noirist,
Try this and see if it works. Some people have had some success.

Tested with VLC 3.0.6

1. Install VLC and MakeMKV
2. Go to the MakeMKV installation directory (usually C:\Program Files (x86)\MakeMKV) and copy libmmbd.dll to the VLC installation directory (usually C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC) twice
3. Rename one of these copies to libaacs.dll and the other to libbdplus.dll
4. Open MakeMKV and activate it.
5. You should be able to play BDs in VLC using the Media > Open Disc > Blu-Ray function.
if this is a 4k disk make sure to uncheck disk menus

Let us all know if it works.
That's a really strange situation.
It shouldn't matter but are the .iso's that play protected or unprotected?
I use PDVD for UHD play but I did try using VLC once when someone on the Forum said it can now handle UHD.
My recollection is the player said I needed a later version of Java and wouldn't play the UHD menu, but did play the movie ok.

Since UHD menu's is a later development for VLC, the process probably still has some glitches. But if you're not particularly interested in the Menu it should be ok.

You could also try AnyDVD's SpeedMenu option and see it that works better.
Yeah, I think HDR capability started with 2.0a, as you say.
Also, make sure your HDMI cable can handle the extra bandwidth for UHD. I had to upgrade mine to one that could handle 4k @ 60 Hz.

And make sure you connect to an HDMI 2.0 port on your TV. When I had a Samsung 4k TV, I discovered the hard way that only one of its 4 HDMI ports could handle UHD and HDR...

T
The .ISO's that play are not protected.
PDVD? Power DVD? OK, so, I bought and installed PowerDVD 18 Ultra. It will **NOT** play any 4k UHD Blu-Ray discs or .ISOs. It says I need to have a CPU that supports SGX. My i7-6800k CPU does not have the SGX extensions in it's instruction set. Now I am asking Cyberlink for a refund... :-(

Oh well.

Adding the libraries as suggested to the VLC directory made VLC work OK for playing UDH Blu-Rays, now it seems all will play. Thanks for that.
Nah, don't use PowerDVD. It sux. Personally, if I want to play a UHD on my pc, I use DVDFab Player 5, but generally, I just rip them to mkv and use my Kodi HTPC to watch on my big screen TV.
I'm glad adding the libraries to VLC worked out.
Then you likely didn't read the uhd requirements very closely for powerdvd, unfortunately. The SGX requirement is specifically mentioned under the uhd section, along with the cpu and display output. Long story short, Z270 chipset or higher.
Don't think they'll give a refund, but can't hurt to ask ;-)

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I'm glad VLC is working out for you now too.
As for PDVD, Ch3vron is kinda right, they do make it clear on their website you'll need SGX and a slew or other requirements to play UHD discs.

If you can do without a Main Menu, you can get around all that by ripping your UHD discs to .mkv files. PDVD will let you play those without SGX and the rest....

Looks just as good too.

T
James Redfox Development Team Staff Member

Nah. Just keep AnyDVD running. That's the purpose of AnyDVD, run with every program. Including VLC.
James Redfox Development Team Staff Member

Make sure, Java has the same "bitness" as VLC. E.g. 32 bit VLC needs 32 bit Java. 64 bit VLC 64 bit Java.
Well I got my Asus BW-16D1HT firmware downgraded to MK3.10 firmware. With AnyDvd running, playing Bad Boys For Life on my 4K monitor with a Ryzen 5 2600 and a GTX1060 6GB. It plays immaculately. Those specs from Cyberlink are ridiculous. That is saying a 64 core threadripper could not run a 4k UHD because it does not have SGX extensions??? They need to get real. Thankfully AnyDVD rises above it thank you!
Well the official powerdvd uhd requirements SPECIFICALLY tell you, you need an Intel based cpu (with show requirements). So it throwing you that warning shouldn't be a surprise. It has to do with sgx being used for safeguard the decryption keys in a small secure area of the ram I believe.
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