Installing Gutsy on PS3 and musings on Blu-ray backups

Well, its done. The instructions on psubuntu.com are really all that you need, so I won't go into much detail here. I'll note that I tried an update straight up using the update-manager, but this left me with an unbootable system, so I decided to install from scratch. Then I upgraded the kernel to support Bluetooth, Wifi, and UDF 2.5.

I popped in a Blu-ray movie, and was amazed to see that the UDF 2.5 functionality actually works and the disk was mounted as a drive almost immediately. I was able to browse through the disk's directories etc. but due to AACS, was unable to play any of the m2ts files containing the actual video and audio. Next thing I'm going to tackle is how to work with Blu-ray movies to decrypt them and put them onto my external drive for watching. The following things come to mind, which remain to be tried out:

1. Using the dd command to rip an ISO of the entire disk from PS3 to an external drive, then mounting that ISO in Windows and using AnyDVD to do the decryption.
2. Using DumpHD in on the PS3 itself to do the decryption (I THINK this is written in Java, have to make sure).

Of course there are annoyances here with number one, like determining what filesystem plays nice with Windows and Linux while supporting 20 GB files, all the while remembering that my target drive is formatted for playback with my Mac. I think HFS+ is my best bet, as Ubuntu supports it, MacDrive is available for Windows, and its Apple's native format. Number two sounds easier, but I'm not sure at all how user friendly the UI is. I guess I'll post another update maybe after Thanksgiving.