This news is coming a few days late (MPlayer's web-site lacks any RSS or syndication support), but the latest MPlayer code in their SVN trunk now supports most HD-DVD and Blu-ray codecs. Earlier this year we talked about
possible Blu-ray support for FFmpeg and
developers becoming more interested after we
interviewed the FFmpeg developers and there ended up being an outpouring of support by our readers offering up Blu-ray drives and other forms of help.
The latest MPlayer code in their Subversion repository now supports most Blu-ray and HD-DVD codecs. MPlayer though cannot play any content "out of the box", but there is an MPlayer patch on the
Doom9 Forums that provides a library and patch to be applied against the latest SVN code that drops in Blu-ray playback support. There is also support for ripping legal copies of Blu-ray content on Linux
using this guide.
Finally it's becoming possible to play your legal Blu-ray movies on Linux. More details on the
MPlayer web-site.