My adventures with blu-tinted glasses
I mentioned earlier that I got a Blu-ray drive. Unfortunately, because of the iron grip of the MPAA, I have two options: pay $70-100 for a supported Windows-based software player and be forced to watch movies only under Windows, or use an unsupported method to obtain the necessary keys to be able to watch the movie under Linux. I did the latter.

So, right now I am able to watch Blu-ray streams under Linux. I have access to the individual video components; nothing else. For example, if a particular disc has the movie plus five previews, then I see six individual files. Like with regular files, I can choose which ones to play. The upside: I can skip previews if I want to. The downside: these video streams are all I get; I don't have access to menus, such as language and subtitle selection. Normally this is not a problem, but it turned out to be a big problem tonight.

Tonight I rented "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" on Blu-ray and converted a back room of the house to a home theater. I had four other audience members, who were more-or-less sold on my promises of superior, high-definition quality. Eager to show off the blu-tinted wave of the future, I started the movie.

The first spoken words occurred about five minutes into the movie. At that point we realized that we're hearing an Asian language. "Ooh, hold on, I can fix this!" I exclaimed and ran over to the laptop. Cycling through the available audio tracks gave us the opportunity to hear the director's and Adam Sandler's commentary (in English), but we simply couldn't find an audio track containing just the English version of the movie. We tried everything we could think of, to no avail.

After many minutes of trying various options to see whether we can somehow stumble onto the English audio track—which we know must be hiding there somewhere—we gave up.

I wish I knew someone else who plays Blu-ray discs under Linux with mplayer.

What's your plan regarding Blu-ray? Got plans to buy it? Or are you waiting for the next best thing? Or you're not a consumer whore like me?