First Release Of Open-Source Blu-Ray Library

The libbluray project put out its first official release a few weeks ago. This open-source (GNU GPLv2) library is intended to support Blu-Ray disc playback by media players such as VLC and MPlayer.

The libbluray 0.21 release is the first from the project and it happened on the 30th of November. This release hasn't been widely publicized and I just happened to know about it this morning from an indirectly-related message on another mailing list. This project was born out of the Doom9 community and has been under development since 2009.

There aren't many details on the 0.21 release but the VLC announcement simply states: "VideoLAN and the libbluray developers would like to present the first official release of their library to help playback of Blu-Ray for open source systems." (There also isn't any change-log or useful documentation distributed with the libbluray package.)

This GPL Blu-Ray library doesn't circumvent any of the Blu-ray DRM procedures and does provide support for navigation/play-lists/menus on Blu-Ray discs. This library is currently supported on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X systems.

The libbluray code is used by MPlayer, VLC, and XBMC, among other open-source multimedia projects.

Those interested can find libbluray on VideoLAN.org.

Also experiencing its first official release is the libaacs library. The libaacs code was released at version 0.30 and is also a VideoLAN project developed by those from Doom9. This GPL library is about implementing AACS (Advanced Access Control System) support in open-source. However, the code itself is useless unless you supply it with an AACS key, in which case you can decrypt protected content such as Blu-ray discs.