Making Demo Reels From Specific Chapters

[MikeyHimself]

I have been all set up ripping my 4K UHD media for a few months now, but it occurred to me that it would be very convenient to just rip specific chapters from some of my collection as demo reels. Example: Rip the beach landing chapter in Saving Private Ryan, the Race scene in Ready Player One, etc. This might be covered in here but while I can see the total chapters that MKV is ripping in the complete file, I can't figure out how to select specific chapters to rip as a single file, if that is even capable with MakeMKV. I searched but didn't seem to find a thread on this. Any help would be greatly appreciated! If the thread already exists, link and I will delete this!

[Woodstock]

It is rather difficult to do with MakeMKV itself. You'd have to manually open the disk and find which file(s) contain the segments you want, and rip just those. Not all disks have everything as single files.

Or, you can have MakeMKV rip the whole track, and other utilities (like handbrake) extract the portion you want. This would be simpler.

[Radiocomms237]

Open MKVToolNix, drag 'n drop the file into the "Input" tab.

On the "Output" tab select "Split mode: Before chapters" from the drop-down box and type in the chapter numbers on the next line (the number of the chapter you want and the next one, separated by a comma).

[Start multiplexing]

This should output three files: everything before the chapter; the chapter you want; and everything after the chapter. Just delete the first & last and keep the chapter in the middle.

This won't touch your source file at all, that will remain as it was.

Note that chapter timecodes won't always give you a 'clean' start/finish to a clip, if you want to be more precise you could use a video editing suite and maybe add fades etc.

[MikeyHimself]

It is rather difficult to do with MakeMKV itself. You'd have to manually open the disk and find which file(s) contain the segments you want, and rip just those. Not all disks have everything as single files.

Or, you can have MakeMKV rip the whole track, and other utilities (like handbrake) extract the portion you want. This would be simpler.

All of the discs I have ripped have only shown the total chapters, nothing is expandable/specific chapter selectable.

Does Handbrake handle chopping the ripped files and maintaining Dolby TrueHD/Atmos/DTS-X? That is the other issue I have been running into with alternative software, most reformat to a max of Dolby Digital 5.1

[Woodstock]

Handbrake can slice things up by time or chapters from MKV or MP4 sources. The version I use doesn't handle some of the more advanced audio sources as "pass through", but, if you're running the post-Win7 versions, I believe you can maintain high-spec audio. More information is available at handbrake.fr , their website.

[MikeyHimself]

Open MKVToolNix, drag 'n drop the file into the "Input" tab.

On the "Output" tab select "Split mode: Before chapters" from the drop-down box and type in the chapter numbers on the next line (the number of the chapter you want and the next one, separated by a comma).

[Start multiplexing]

This should output three files: everything before the chapter; the chapter you want; and everything after the chapter. Just delete the first & last and keep the chapter in the middle.

This won't touch your source file at all, that will remain as it was.

Note that chapter timecodes won't always give you a 'clean' start/finish to a clip, if you want to be more precise you could use a video editing suite and maybe add fades etc.

I have one file multiplexing now. I hope it works! Thank you for the in depth step-by-step.