VLC Blu-Ray menu tips

[jelockwood]

Some Blu-Ray ISOs cause VLC to get stuck when loading the menu. Typically what happens is that VLC loads the disc/ISO/folder plays the intro animation or movie studio logo and then gets stuck before it can display the full BDJava menu.

In at least one case there should be an intermediate screen allowing the user to select which language the Blu-Ray should use.

Until now the only option has been to disable use of Blu-Ray menus completely. This itself is poorly designed. For normal DVDs there is a simple tick-box in the Open Disc dialog but no such option for Blu-Rays. For Blu-Rays you instead have to do the following -

Go to Preferences
Click Show All
Expand Access Modules
Select Blu-ray
Untick Blu-ray menus
Click Save
and then open the Blu-Ray for playback

However I did discover after upgrading to VLC 3.0.10 although that may have been nothing to do with it that if/when this problem occurs you press the Return key on the Mac this does seem to cause it to continue to the next stage i.e. the full Blu-Ray menu. A guess might be that this is selecting whatever default choice the non-displayed intermediary screen might be showing.

I also more recently have been able to try newer alternative Mac Blu-Ray player software and seen a similar issue with the same titles of them getting stuck at the same point. Again as a guess these maybe using the same open source library for processing Blu-Ray menus. Unfortunately the trick of pressing return did not work for them.

So, at least for VLC we may now have a workaround but clearly it would be better if the relevant Blu-Ray library was 'fixed' so as not to get stuck in the first place.

On a related topic the (poor) documentation here https://wiki.videolan.org/QtHotkeys/ says that Shift-M would bring up the disc menu. On a Mac Shift-M etc. do not work and it seems Control-M is the Mac equivalent. I did also find some options caused VLC to crash. As one would expect and hope in general the same disc navigation keys apply to playing Blu-Rays as well. However Blu-Rays do also have another type of menu which can be brought up and displayed on top of the still playing movie. This seems to be usually triggered by using the up and down arrow keys. However for the original Blade Runner Blu-Ray it seems instead to use the Return key to trigger its display. For some discs I also noticed that Control-M took you to the beginning of a disc i.e. Title meaning you had to wait for it to play through to the menu possibly via numerous trailers. It seems to vary from disc to disc.