Playing Blu-ray with Zoom Player

Published November 3rd, 2024

Blu-ray discs may be encrypted

As an indie developer, I don't have the financial resources to license and implement the Blu-Ray standard. As such, encrypted Blu-ray content can't be played in Zoom Player. If you are looking to play encrypted content, I would recommend your try PowerDVD, it's probably the only player for Windows with this capability.

Mounting images as virtual drive

If you are planning on playing Blu-ray ISO images, you must first mount an ISO image as a virtual drive. There are plenty of free tools for this purpose, I recommend Virtual CloneDrive as it allows for mounting automation.

Auto-Mounting images

Instead of manually having to deal with mounting the ISO image, you can have Zoom Player automate this process.

Open the Advanced Options dialog (Ctrl+"O" keyboard shortcut). If the options dialog opens in Basic Mode, click the "Switch to Advacned Mode" button on the bottom-left of the options dialog. Using the left-pane, navigate to "File Format Assocation / File Extensions" and scroll down until you see the "ISO Mount Command".

If you installed Virtual CloneDrive to its default folder, you can specify the following command line in the "ISO Mount Command" field:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Elaborate Bytes\VirtualCloneDrive\VCDMount.exe" /l=G "%n"

This command line instructs Virtual CloneDrive to mount the ISO image to drive "G". Make sure to pick a drive letter that doesn't currently exists. Now you can choose to have Zoom Player automatically play the drive after mounting by setting "Open drive after mount" to the same drive letter you specified in the Virtual CloneDrive's command line parameter.

Menus with libVLC

libVLC is an open-source component derived from VLC Player. Zoom Player itself does not support BluRay menus, but libVLC does and you can choose to use libVLC as the media engine for Blu-Ray playback under "Advanced Options / Playback / libVLC". To navigate the menus, use the keyboard's arrow and enter keys to pick and activate menu entries.

Playback

There are four possible sources for Blu-ray content:

ISO image

Assuming you've setup Zoom Player to auto-mount ISO images using the procedure above, simply open the ISO file within Zoom Player and it will be mounted and played automatically.

Blu-ray Drive

Assuming the disc in the drive is not encrypted, all you need to do is right-click Zoom Player's video area, navigate to "Open / Open Drive" and pick the Blu-Ray drive.

Virtual Drive

Similar to an actual disc, all you need to do is right-click Zoom Player's video area, navigate to "Open / Open Drive" and pick the Virtual drive.

Folder

Assuming you've extracted a Blu-ray image to a sub-folder, you can right-click Zoom Player's video area, navigate to "Open / Open Folder" and pick the folder with the extracted Blu-Ray content.

Conclusion

Blu-ray playback on a Windows PC is far from optimal, but hopefully the information in this tutorial has helped get you on the right track.