Playing Blu-Ray movies on PowerPC G4/G5

Well, this is more like a “How to play Blue-Ray movies on your iBook G4 notebook in theory”, because the G4 CPU is not suited for this kind of workload and a dual G5 machine will probably definitely do better. You will need OS X 10.5 Leopard (the UDF 2.5 driver was introduced in this version of OS X) and Macports installed.

Step 1

Download VLC 2.0.10 and install it on your machine.

Step 2

If you already have Macports, you will need to install the libaacs library, which provides AACS support for Blu-Ray playback.

$ sudo port install libaacs

If you don’t have Macports, install it.

Step 3

Download a keydb.cfg file from the FindVUK Online Database and extract the archive somewhere. Create an aacs directory inside ~/Library/Preferences/ and copy the keydb.cfg file inside.

$ mkdir ~/Library/Preferences/aacs
$ cp keydb.cfg ~/Library/Preferences/aacs/

Copy libaacs.dylib into /usr/local/lib (linking it might work too) so VLC can find the library.

$ cp /opt/local/lib/libaacs.0.dylib /usr/local/lib/libaacs.dylib

That’s about it, now you can open VLC and attempt to play a Blu-Ray disc on your laptop’s puny G4 CPU.