How to Play DVDs and Blu-rays with mpv?

Using mpv to play physical media like DVDs and Blu-rays is a powerful way to enjoy your disc collection without dealing with heavy, bloated media players. While mpv is primarily a command-line-focused tool, it has robust built-in support for optical drives. This guide covers the exact commands needed to play DVDs and Blu-rays directly from your optical drive, how to navigate menus, select specific titles or chapters, and handle the encryption hurdles often found on commercial Blu-ray discs.

Playing DVDs with mpv

Playing a standard DVD in mpv is straightforward because the player includes native dvd:// and dvdnav:// protocols. For the best experience, it is highly recommended to use dvdnav://, as it attempts to replicate the actual DVD menu experience and handles multi-angle discs or complex features much better than the legacy parser.

• Play with full menus (Recommended): Open your terminal or command prompt and run the following command to start the DVD with full menu navigation support: mpv dvdnav://
• Play the main title directly: If you want to bypass the unskippable warnings and menus to jump straight into the movie, use the legacy protocol: mpv dvd://
• Target a specific drive: If you have multiple optical drives, or if mpv does not automatically detect your disc, specify the device path manually:
• Linux/macOS: mpv dvdnav:// --dvd-device=/dev/sr0
• Windows: mpv dvdnav:// --dvd-device=D: (Replace D: with your actual drive letter)

Playing Blu-ray Discs with mpv

Blu-ray playback follows a similar logic to DVDs but utilizes the bd:// protocol. Unlike DVDs, mpv does not reliably support interactive Blu-ray menus (BD-J), so it will typically default to playing the longest title on the disc automatically.

• Play the main movie: Run the following command to spin up your Blu-ray drive and play the primary video stream: mpv bd://
• Play a specific title: If the disc starts playing a “behind-the-scenes” featurette instead of the movie, you can manually target a different title track (e.g., title 2): mpv bd://2
• Specify the Blu-ray drive path: Just like with DVDs, you can point mpv directly to the hardware path if needed:
• Linux: mpv bd:// --bluray-device=/dev/sg1
• Windows: mpv bd:// --bluray-device=E:

Overcoming Blu-ray Encryption (AACS)

If you attempt to play a commercial, store-bought Blu-ray disc, you will likely encounter an error stating that the playback failed due to encryption. Commercial Blu-rays are protected by AACS encryption. To make mpv play these discs seamlessly in the background, your system requires an additional open-source library called libaacs along with a regularly updated key database file (KEYDB.cfg).

• Linux: Install the library via your package manager (e.g., sudo apt install libaacs1 on Debian/Ubuntu) and place a valid KEYDB.cfg file into your ~/.config/aacs/ directory.
• Windows: Download the libaacs.dll file that matches your mpv architecture (usually 64-bit) and place it in the same directory as your mpv.exe. Then, place the KEYDB.cfg file inside your %APPDATA%/aacs/ folder.

Once these decryption keys are properly configured in their respective folders, mpv will automatically decrypt and play commercial Blu-ray discs in the background using the standard mpv bd:// command.