Is there any free windows software that can play 3D Blu-rays?

No, not yet.

The issue is that in order to read commercial blu-ray disks (which I'm assuming is what you're after, that being playing 3D movies), you need a codec that is capable of decrypting the blu-ray disk. In the US and many other countries, licensing the decryption keys from the Blu-ray Disk Association requires money, and a good bit of it-- to make up these costs, all companies which are marketing Blu-ray players and playback software are selling them instead of making them available for free download. Moreover, it is a legal grey area (in the US and some other countries) to reverse engineer or otherwise circumvent the encryption (It's DRM, and falls under DCMA), so even if someone wrote a library that did such, any media players using it would make themselves into high-profile targets for lawsuits and harassment. The encryption used on DVDs had the same issues (which is why Linux took so long to get proper DVD playback), and the library used (libdecss) is used widely now only because software authors feel rather confident that the the DVD consortium will not chase after them and has more or less given up on securing that format.

The internal video formats used for Blu-ray disks however are well-known and mostly supported, and if you use a product such as SlySoft's AnyDVD HD, which will transparently decrypt the disk and provide applications with access to the decrypted movie files, then players such as MPlayer, VLC, and others might be able to play back the disk by manually browsing the video files on the disk and playing them.

It's worth noting that the free players also lack many of blu-ray's features at this time beyond straight video playback, such as proper menu support, BD-J, and BD-Live. I imagine these will come with time, but I would not expect them to be working within the next several months. VLC is expected to add playback for encrypted bluray disks with version 1.2, and is all around a very good video player. I'd keep an eye on that one if you want one to watch the progress of bluray support.

Darth Android

Posted 2011-07-18T15:26:13.993

Reputation: 35 133

BD-Live is a "feature" now? ;) – Shinrai – 2011-07-20T21:36:48.117

@Shinrai for the sake of argument, I'm considering anything beyond decoding the main video/audio stream of the movie and presenting them to the user as a 'feature'-- Anything that would be lost by ripping the movie to disk and then playing it back. – Darth Android – 2011-07-20T22:13:36.087

@Darth Android: You just incorporated my answer into yours! – harrymc – 2011-07-26T18:42:05.807

@harrymc I updated my answer, yes, but you'll see that the first half of that paragraph (which has been there since the beginning of my answer) comes from the very same post as the second half. We simply found the same post through Google.

– Darth Android – 2011-07-26T18:52:12.057

VLC was mentioned first in my answer, which I still think is the correct one. As this argument can go on forever, I leave this up to you to decide whether your update came too late afterward. – harrymc – 2011-07-26T19:14:52.267

VLC was mentioned in my original post, actually. And there's no such thing as "too late"-- you should always strive to add and update your answers to make them as best as they can be. A half-answer helps no one. – Darth Android – 2011-07-26T20:21:12.043

Sometimes the complete answer is a compendium of answers, which is the idea behind SU. One shouldn't strive to improve one answer so as to include everything. The ethical approach is to ensure before answering that it wasn't already mentioned by another (netiquette). – harrymc – 2011-07-27T06:01:32.383

Is there any free windows software that can play 3D Blu-rays?

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