external blue-ray player

[Metalrocks]

was thinking of getting a external blue-ray player for my win 7 64bit desktop machine. but i have read that playing blue-rays over WMP, it requires a code pack of some sort. also that playing them on win 7 may not work entirely.
then i read that it would be better to get VLC player but is the quality actually good?
other players like powerdvd would play blue-rays but they arent cheap.

any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[SnowyGamester]

From what I understand VLC only plays unencrypted Bluray by default. There are plugins you can use but I don't know how reliable they are. Maybe you should seek out a drive that has PowerDVD bundled with it just to cover your bases.

 

[Metalrocks]

From what I understand VLC only plays unencrypted Bluray by default. There are plugins you can use but I don't know how reliable they are. Maybe you should seek out a drive that has PowerDVD bundled with it just to cover your bases.

interesting. this i did not read anywhere when i did some digging around. powerdvd isnt really cheap either. i used to have it a long time ago for a gpu but of course its obsolete now for modern systems.
i was hoping that these players would be region free, since i want to play movies from other places. even most of the blue-rays are region free, some arent.

 

[mad825]

Well you can quite easily play Blu-rays on VLC. At least the older ones anyway but you'll need to Google and download libaacs.dll from a third party website as it's not "officially" supported by VLC themselves.Winkwink.

The only main issue I had with it that it's not really possible to navigate via the DVD menus should it have one in the first place so getting to the extras can be a bit of a pain.