To be honest, I was not aware of the fact that the Ubuntu Linux computer operating system does not have built-in support for burning/recording Blu-ray discs until user Federico reported the issue on the Ubuntu Desktop mailing list a couple of weeks ago, simply because I have never owned this technology.

Apparently, there’s nothing wrong with playing Blu-ray discs, but the problem, as Federico reports it, relies on the burning of such discs under the Ubuntu distribution. He reminds us that Ubuntu switched to using cdrkit over cdrecord for optical media recording back in 2008 when Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) was released.

“The reason is I feel we are failing to our users regarding Blu-ray burning support,” says Federico. “There are lots of bugs in the Ubuntu tools and their default configurations (crdkit, K3b and Brasero) that simply mean Ubuntu does not support Blu-ray burning by default. Launchpad bugs regarding that matter are getting nowhere.”

Blu-ray burning is not supported in Brasero and K3b on Ubuntu

Federico also informs us that it is a known fact that both Brasero, which is used in Ubuntu, and K3b, used in Kubuntu, don’t support Blu-ray burning out of the box, and that a workaround exists in the official Ubuntu Wiki to enable Blu-ray recording via the cdrecord software from Brandon Snaider's PPA.

Now, to fix this issue, Federico suggests to Canonical and Ubuntu developers that the cdrecord utility to be at least published on either the universe or multiverse software repositories of the Ubuntu operating system, so that Brasero and K3b can use it for Blu-ray disc burning.

Believe it or not, I never burned a Blu-ray disc, ever, on any operating system. Why? Simply because USB devices replaced CD/DVD optical media in my life so fast that I forgot about them in a split of a second. Today, I don’t own a computer with an optical drive, nor CD/DVD/BD discs. What do you think? Should Canonical implement Blu-ray burning support in Ubuntu or not?