Ripping blu-rays with "in-movie experience"

[nitro322]

Hi. I've been slowly working my way through my blu-ray collection with MakeMKV, but I've just run into the first problem I haven't been able to figure out. I'm a a bit of a completionist when it comes to ripping my movies, so I usually rip all available titles on the disc, delete the ones that are obvious garbage (legal/warning screens, etc.), then rename and encode the rest. I also include commentary tracks and various other special features of movies in this.

The problem I've encountered is with the In-Movie Experience feature on several Harry Potter blu-rays. According to wikipedia, "In-Movie Experience, or IME, is a technology developed by Warner Bros. for Blu-ray and HD DVD. It allows users to watch HD bonus content in real-time while the main feature is playing using picture-in-picture technology. This could include interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, deleted or extended scenes and other making-of material featuring the film's cast and crew." I would guess other studios use similar functionality with a different brand name.

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to rip this. Either I'm missing something, or MakeMKV currently isn't capable of ripping it. When ripping Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, for example, I get three feature-length titles: The first two titles are the same length as the film itself and differ only, as far as I can tell, in the selection of languages and subtitles included with them. The third title is about 9 minutes longer, though playback actually stops at the same time as the other titles.

The extra 9 minutes seems at a glance to be an error in the ripping process, but after looking more closely it turns out this file includes a subtitle track for the in-movie experience content. Unfortunately, though, it's still missing both the video overlays as well as the 'commentary' track (I'm not sure if there's actually supposed to be a separate feature-length track for this or the audio just gets spliced in from the video overlays).

What's even weirder is that I can't seem to find either the video or audio content anywhere in MakeMKV's output. I can find the subtitles again in the various individual chapters that are ripped as separate titles (which I'm guessing is related to the seamless branching functionality), but none of the ripped titles contain either the video or audio from those In-Movie Experience overlays.

Anyone familiar with this, or try to rip it before? Any tips or suggestions, or is this just a limitation in MakeMKV? If that latter, are there any plans to add this functionality at some point?

One final note on this - in the last two movies in the series, they switched to something called Maximum Movie Mode. It seems similar in concept, though I don't know the technical details behind it. MakeMKV *can*, however, rip these just fine. It rips the Maximum Movie Mode content as a complete separate title, which makes things very convenient. I'm sure there are some technical differences between how each is implemented, but it does make me think that if it's capable of getting the Maximum Movie Mode content, then it should also be capable of getting the In-Movie Experience content.

Anyway, sorry for the longish post. Just wanted to clearly explain what I was trying to do. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Woodstock]

Some others have looked at this, but the issue is that the IME is Java code that does a picture-in-picture from other tracks on the BD. The trick would be to first include the Java code in the MKV file, then find a player that knows about it to execute the Java and then find the correct file to play within the current file.

[Devore]

Either it is in another content track elsewhere on the disk, or it might be streamed from their website. I always thought "live content" was from online, not pre-canned on disk.

[nitro322]

Ahh, Java would certainly complicate things. So yeah, I'd say ripping the full IME video is likely a no-go based on that. Shouldn't we be able to still get at least the individual video/audio clips that are played in the overlay, though? I went through every single title ripped from those blu-rays, and they just aren't there. The closest I could get, as described, was the subtitles.

Devore - I'm almost 100% certain this is stored on the disk itself. While my blu-ray player is on the network, I believe I have the BD-Live functionality disabled in the settings, and if I explicitly try to launch that feature it refuses to play.

[Legenista]

Oddly, when I got some REMUXEs from Matrix movies, I never saw any (audio) commentary track from this.

For specs, check here for the UHD/4K:
http://dvdcompare.net/comparisons/film.php?fid=49715

And Blu-rays 1080p:
http://dvdcompare.net/comparisons/film.php?fid=14306

Note that we have:

1) Philosophers commentary by Dr. Cornel West & Ken Wilder
2) Critics commentary by Todd McCarthy, John Powers & David Thomson

3) In-Movie Experience picture-in-picture commentary

When I got my rips, only the first two were there to be found. No sign of any 3rd track, in any form: subtitles or audio.

But today I ripped the old edition from MATRIX REVOLUTIONS (2003), Blu-ray. And to my surprise, this is what I saw. I am unchecking all extra content and only showing the title related to the MOVIE itself.

https://i.postimg.cc/Znz7Hhyg/PIC1.jpg

First thing we notice is that chapters are missing from the repeated stream. This is what the 1st one looks like:

https://i.postimg.cc/xjLFCqwS/PIC2.jpg

At first, I would only rip with the first two commentaries. And nothing else.

Oddly when I looked into the repeated #2 title, this is what I found (check the two pictures):

https://i.postimg.cc/x8GsFFvd/PIC3.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/qM0DC4r6/PIC4.jpg

So, not only 1) and 2) are there, 3) it is, as well! But 3) is missing from the 1st title!

Not only that, in PIC 4 we discover 3) also is available as english subtitles.

And this is the end result, I took a picture of the resulting MKV while selecting these "In Movie Experience" audio commentaries:



I didn't expect to find a 3rd audio/subtitle commentary track available for ripping.

From what I can tell, the 2008 edition (and this is the old one, due to the VC-1 codec) had the:

- In-Movie Experience picture-in-picture commentary

While the 2018 one something else:

- "In-movie Experience" picture-in picture video commentary

Any thoughts?