Create custom menu navigation after ripping?

[electronicsguy]

Hello,
I tried searching but couldn't find anything definitive. Lets say we rip a bluray into a set of mkv titles - main title plus the extras. I understand that the mkv container format doesn't support any menus. What I was interested to know is if it is possible to create a custom menu ourselves.

All I want is some kind of frontend in which I can specify the titles as a list, and maybe add extra metadata. I don't know exactly how at this time, but the frontend could be implemented as a java VM or a simple xml file or something else which is playable in popular players like pdvd or vlc. Is something like this possible? Have you heard of anything remotely like this?

[ndjamena]

Um, a file system and tags maybe?

VLC will probably do playlists as well...

[electronicsguy]

well a file system is ofcourse there. But I was thinking something along the lines of combining all mkv files together into 1 single file, and using a simple menu to browse inside a player.

[ndjamena]

Matroska has lots of features no one actually uses, I'm pretty sure something like that is possible using chapter editions, the file would be huge though, and nothing I'm aware of would actually play them, so they'd only work in theory until someone creates a proper Matroska player. Other than that, there are playlists, a lot of programs list video files as a necessity. Mezzmo gives me a list of all my video files, with metadata, that I can sort however I like, I can even tell it to play them in VLC if I want. I'm pretty sure XBMC gives a pretty good list of videos too (although I won't be using it until I get a HTPC set up). There's Media Center, Media Center Master (which won't actually play them, but it can download metadata like nothing else)... I'm not entirely sure what you're asking for, as far as I'm aware there's nothing missing from my setup and I see no functional purpose in adding yet another list that apparently does nothing special.

[Dazkine]

But I was thinking something along the lines of combining all mkv files together into 1 single file,

Well thats a bad idea. You should make seperate mkv files for movie and bonus/extras.

Ordered Chapters/Editions are just for Seamless Branching, Multiangle things like that because you need the same audio- and subtitle tracks for that. Also the videos must have same codec, resolution etc.