Agree, Blu-ray on a computer (PC or Mac) is currently for geeks only and totally not user-friendly.
In your case, the issue is that with Blu-ray, the whole playback-display chain must be made of HDCP compliant devices, for instance your graphic card, but also your TV.
HDCP is a content protection measure that prevents unauthorized copies (even though fair use copies are tolerated or even legal in most countries). The graphic card has no way to know whether the data goes to a TV or some illegal recording device, so the flow
of data is just shut down if the device is not HDCP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth\_Digital\_Content\_Protection
I do play most of my Blu-ray movies on TV too (from the computer), I suppose my TV is modern enough to have HDCP, but even if it was not, I would be able to play my movies without any problem because I remove the HDCP copy protection code with AnyDVD HD.
Yep, another geeky (and costly) tool. It also removes other copy protection codes for DVDs and the very few CDs that have it.
Removing these copy protection measures is a mandatory and undocumented/unintuitive step if you want to either build a digital media library (by ripping your discs to your computer drive) or play them on every kind of device you own. Every DVD/BD ripper includes
such a feature, with more or less success, and just like your living room Blu-ray player if you have any, they require a constant connection to the Internet in order to upgrade and read and decrypt the latest movie discs produced, unlike DVDs which can play
any movie years after the player's release.
AnyDVD acts like an intermediate between the disc and the computer, as it decrypts on the fly all the HDCP-encrypted data for any application that tries accessing the disc, so you don't even need a dedicated ripper, you can just as well copy the disc content
to your hard drive using drag and drop in plain old Windows Explorer. But that piece of software is bloody expensive... :[
Sorry I didn't answer you correctly the first time, but you mentioned TV playback only now.
I thought you had problems playing and displaying Blu-ray discs on your laptop, and I didn't understand why the problem would be limited to rented discs only, not purchased ones.