A bigger problem for using your linux machine as a media PC than bluray is the lack of Netflix. You can make it work with wine and some patches, but it's a non-trivial amount of work and/or disruptive to your normal wine install.
Why does Netflix matter? I've never jumped on that bandwagon and I don't miss it. I watch one or two movies a year, and the free, legal content available on Hulu / Crunchyroll / Youtube / over-the-air TV is more than I can possibly consume!
And besides, can't you just ask Netflix to mail you a physical DVD if your OS isn't compatible with their streaming service? Or did they finally shut down / spin off that service like they wanted to a few years ago?
Or you could reboot to Windows...I'm assuming your PC came pre-installed with it, and these days Ubuntu is pretty good at preserving your bootloader provided you don't tell it to format your disk when you install.
> I've never jumped on that bandwagon and I don't miss it.
That's... lovely. I'm not sure what it has to do with the price of rice in china, though. You don't miss something you've never had? That kind of goes without saying.
I watch considerably more than one or two movies a year, and netflix is a great way to watch them on a casual basis. I don't want to get CDs in the mail and I don't really have any interest in dual booting to windows (and no, most of my PCs don't come preinstalled with anything).
I'm really not even sure what the point of your post is, except to say that I should inconvenience myself greatly for no really good reason.
Try netflix-desktop. It's a package available for Ubuntu and Arch (probably more, but those I know of). One click install of everything you need for Netflix, without messing with your current Wine install. Worked for me!
When last I looked at it, it actually can't be installed alongside the official wine package from the ubuntu PPA. I'm sure it's possible to do it manually and have it alongside, but that's a fair amount of work.
Until the patches are all in upstream it's basically an alpha capability. And having to use wine at all for it makes it second-class compared to using a normal windows install.
