And decided it wasn't consistent with my goals for this project. I'm building this system around a PC, and it's dual-use: The computer's day job is to be my development server on which I build Web sites. So when I consider peripherals, I always have to justify it for business use.

In the case of a bluray player, that means an internal drive, and preferably a writer. Blu ray with 25 gigs is the only medium with even a prayer of backing up data in the volume I use (4 terabytes of storage on this server!).

Which is where I run into a problem. Media players for Windows have already paid the licensing fee to get a decryption key for bluray discs, but there are no players available for Linux. I won't be able to watch any commercial blu rays on this machine.

For a while yet. I know you're wondering where the "cracker" is, since it was the same problem on Linux which inspired somebody to break DVD encryption lo these many years ago. Seems that blu ray encryption is tougher, and so far there hasn't been a practical method (just difficult proofs-of-concept to show that it least it can be done, in theory).

Sigh...it's an old story, dumbshit corporations throwing artifical barriers in the way of people making legitimate use of recorded media for which they've paid the requested price. They always lose the fight eventually, why do they bother?