Playing blu-ray audio?

I have learned about a set of blu-ray audio discs I’d really like to get, but I don’t own a blu-ray player (e.g., an Oppo). The discs contain both 5.1 and 2.0 mixes, and it’s the latter I would play since I don’t have a surround-sound setup. I can borrow an external USB blu-ray player from a friend and connect it to the computer in my music room. Can foobar2000 (with plugins, I assume, as for playing DSD) play blu-ray audio? Any other method? My laptop came with some software to play blu-ray movies–would that work? I have no idea about the sound quality of the latter, of course. (You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m not into movies . . . )

Thanks for any help!

You should be able to play the PCM version off of the disc if this is one of the formats offered. I doubt there is a plug-in for Dolby True HD, or DTS-HD these discs typically contain.

But I also am not a movie/video guy.

If your laptop have a bd drive and bd software then you have a good chance it can decode the HD audio layer and maybe play it using usb and the DAC. YMMV.

Thanks, Elk and oll. I just ordered the disc, so we’ll see what happens.

It is also generally possible to rip PCM audio tracks from a Blu-ray disc (assuming it has such tracks), although that can be a pain and may require the use of copy protection busting software (I express no opinion as to the legality of such software). I don’t have any Blu-ray audio discs so don’t know if they are copy protected (for all I know all Blu-ray discs may be protected). There are how-to articles on computeraudiophile.com, such as:

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/how-is-ted-coding-the-fpgaent/473-ripping-blu-ray-easy-way/

You would need a computer Blu-ray drive (a consumer player would not work). Also software. There is a version of DVD Audio Extractor (available for Mac and PC) that does Blu-ray but it does not bust Blu-ray copy protection (there is other software that would get around this problem). I have ripped the audio off of a couple Blu-ray concert movies (e.g., the Dire Straits “Alchemy” Blu-ray has 96-24 PCM files). It was a pain but it worked.

Thanks for the link, Steve. I knew ripping blu-ray was possible but, as you say, a pain. I’ll borrow my friend’s external drive and see if I can hear the music and, if I like it, then look into ripping.

You’re welcome. Let us know how it works out if you do rip the discs.

I did some internet searching, but did not find a way to just play the blu-ray audio. My DVD-viewing software (which also does blu-ray) recognized the disc and let me browse the contents; maybe it would have played the audio if I had known what files to double-click on (remember I don’t know anything about this stuff). I ended up ripping the discs, which was not difficult with the guidance of that excellent article from CA. Just a pain because the files are so big and take a long time to copy, and the metadata were not in any of the online databases so I had to enter everything from scratch for ~95 tracks. But now I have them.

magister said I did some internet searching, but did not find a way to just play the blu-ray audio. My DVD-viewing software (which also does blu-ray) recognized the disc and let me browse the contents; maybe it would have played the audio if I had known what files to double-click on (remember I don't know anything about this stuff). I ended up ripping the discs, which was not difficult with the guidance of that excellent article from CA. Just a pain because the files are so big and take a long time to copy, and the metadata were not in any of the online databases so I had to enter everything from scratch for ~95 tracks. But now I have them.
If you send downmixed BD audio as bitstream, the renderer needs to contain an inboard BD audio decoder, which a DAC (the DS) does not contain.

You have to make sure that the audio is sent as LPCM at the source end.