www.makemkv.com

Really really new to this Blu-ray ripping stuff. All I want to do for now is put my Blu-ray disk on my HDD, then watch it from there,. So, with MakeMKV I ripped the disk and have a folder full of MKV files. If I click on anyone of them they play just fine, but each one is just a segment of the movie and there are dozens of them. How do I get them to just play from the beginning to the end in the right order?

Edit: After a while I discovered that one of them (at least) is actually the whole movie. It is the longest one, but there are others almost as long. I will delete the rest and try and figure out how to determine what to rip in advance. It is not obvious from the extremely long list of things to check in MakeMKV. Is there a trick to knowing what to rip and what to skip?

I have hundreds of blu-ray's that I have purchased over the years and I too want to convert them to a digital file. I like to import them into iTunes and to do that I use a program called "Handbrake"

I use the "Apple 3" settings and tweak it a little for a full HD file that has all the bloated unwanted files removed. A google search will bring up this program with all the tutorials one could ask for. If you need any additional help just holler.

There's a thing called playlist obfuscation where Blu Ray disc authors deliberately put masses of jumbled playlists on a disc just to make our lives more difficult. If you come across one of those you'll know it.

Other than that, there are sometimes different "cuts" of a movie for several different languages. Disney has that quite often. Since you're in the US, most often the English version will be the first of the appropriate length, usually 00800.mpls, but the rule of first applies just as well to other numbers and other distributers.

Then of course there's special features. They each get their own playlists too. Everything from extended editions to making of documentaries to simply alternate versions of a movie with different tracks selected. If you ever find two titles that look ABSOLUTELY IDENTICAL based on the info MakeMKV is showing you, the most likely cause is that one of the subtitles is US English in one title and UK English in the other.

And finally, there's Java titles. MakeMKV can't read Java titles properly, it can only find the m2ts files they reference. What it does is just dump each m2ts file that is being referenced by Java as it's own title with no chapters. A lot of discs have a playlist of a movie that isn't really used during playback. The real movie is actually a Java title, so you'll find every component that makes up the movie listed independently as m2ts files. Another things about Java titles is that since they're constructed on the fly using a programming language, they don't have to follow the mpls rules. Forced subtitles don't have to be flagged as forced, Java can simply forced them to be displayed using it's own built in code which makes identifying forced subtitles more difficult than it otherwise would be. It can also force two audio streams to be played at once, an ability MakeMKV has no ability to duplicate or to even output any info to help other programs reconstruct how the audio is supposed to sound. It can also initiate picture on picture, basically playing one video stream on top of another, or even overlay images (stored as jpg or png on the disc) on top of the video.

If you search for Toy Story of Terror, you'll find the movie itself doesn't have a proper playlist to represent it, in order to get a working copy you'll either need to trim off part of a dummy playlist that's on the disc (which only gives you one version of the movie), or build the title yourself using other programs.

The Ghostbusters: Slimer Mode Java title really overuses the images over video thing, forced subtitles, audio over audio and PIP.

The Star Trek Access Java title episodes are big on weird forced subtitles, audio over audio and PIP.

--ahhh, I remember handbrake, the good old days... before I started piecing my files together component by component using the best methods I could find...--