Options for Full Blu-ray Disc Playback on PC, Menus, No Region Locking

[gibbdude]

Hello all,
I am new to this forum and quite new to this hobby. I was wondering how possible it is to play Blu-ray discs on PC with complete functionality. I would like to be able to play straight off of the disc, without ripping, and have everything work as intended. I'm mainly interested in this because I'd like to play discs from outside my region, and my current player is a PlayStation 4 which is limited on that front. I do not have a Blu-ray drive for my computer, but I may buy one based off of the feedback I get here. My current media player is MPC-BE with LAV, MadVR, and XySub. I have no experience using it to play discs, but DVD ISO files seem to work great with it, menus and all. I don't know to what extent that reflects the program's ability to play off of video disc drives, though, and Blu-ray menus are different from DVD ones and not really supported, from what I understand. I'm also not sure to what extent I need to be wary of region-locking when trying to do this. Does that depend on the drive? Speaking of which, what drive should I look at getting? Is there a paid media player that can do what I want, or maybe some plugin or additional software? If I'm going to invest in it, I'd like to have a solution that's as broadly compatible and future-proof possible, but I'll greatly appreciate any advice I can get! Sorry for asking so much in my very first post . . .

[DB83]

In the simplest of terms you require 3 things.


1. A blu-ray drive - internal or external. All drives are Region-locked
2. Blu-ray playback software
3. Software to make the drive effectively Region-free


I can not recc a drive but sometimes they do come with playback software. If not here are 2 options (Others do exist):


a. PowerDVD Ultra. Plays disks with full menu support
b. DVDFab Player Ultra. Also plays disks with full menu support. (The standard version only plays the main film)


For the Region-free software, this is built-in to the DVDFab player. For PowerDVD Ultra you would require DVDFab Passkey for blu-ray. The DVDFab products require internet access to set the region code each time you play a disk.

[aedipuss]

pc bluray drives are region locked. you'll need software like AnyDVD HD to unlock regions then any video player software should be able to play them, but not always with complete functionality. i think that's limited to a couple high end paid video programs.

[Cornucopia]

Corel windvdpro is another full-featured, licensed option.

The leawo player appears to be nearly full-featured, but also appears like its free version may be unlicensed so tread lightly there.


Scott

[usually_quiet]

All licensed Blu-ray player software complies with region code restrictions. To get around region code restrictions you either need unlicensed, reverse-engineered Blu-ray player software like DVDFab's Blu-ray player or Leawo Blu-ray Player or something like DVDFab Passkey for Blu-ray or AnyDVD HD running in the background that allows licensed player software like PowerDVD Ultra or Corel WinDVD Pro to work with out-of-region discs. However, because they are reversed engineered rather than developed using a spec from the Blu-ray Disc Association, unlicensed software may not implement every feature in the spec.