www.makemkv.com

So. I have a whole bookshelf of anime, shows, movies, etc that I've collected over time. I've decided to start going through en-mass and ripping them so I can more easily use them. I'm the kind of person who wants to directly own a series I buy, rather than paying for services like Netflix or Hulu, which could at any time they want decide to remove a series or movie. Not to mention some older stuff might never get to those platforms. At the same time, I don't like having to mess with keeping track of discs when watching a multi-disc series. So, I decided to start with the anime Trigun. A moderate length series across 4 discs. Right away there is an issue. The 5-6 episodes on disc 1 come out as a big single 2 hour file. Below is the image of the "tree" of options MakeMKV has for this disc.



Now, in tons of searching, this seems to be a common issue. Most tutorials for MakeMKV feature guys doing Disney movies and the like. Not full length series, and the DVDs themselves were likely more cheaply made than the blockbuster titles. One thing that kept coming back was to use Handbrake. So, I got Handbrake. The purpose of this was to 1, convert the MKV files into something more commonly used, so as to make your library work on more devices. Cool. The other purpose, and the main one for me, was to break up the episodes into individual files, for organization's sake. Normally, Handbrake would be able to detect the episodes by going to the Titles drop-down menu. In doing that, I instead got this.



The other thing that kept coming up was to use MKVMerge. Unfortunately I couldn't ever find anything that bothered to say how to do it, just that you can. So! Seeing as I ran into this problem in disc 1 of over a hundred, chances are it's going to keep coming up. So, what I need is a detailed and definitive explanation of how I can break up these files into individual episodes. Later on down the line, I'm doing Dragon Ball Z, which, is 291 episodes... So this is going to be a big project and I need to know what I'm doing.

Since you've already found handbrake, you're really got your answer. Anime compresses by at least 70%, and often more. And handbrake can deal with splitting the big multi-episode files into single episode files, at chapter boundaries. Just select chapters 1-5, change the name to indicate which episode it is, click Add to queue. Select 6-10, change output name, Add to queue. Repeat as needed.

There isn't much MakeMKV can do when the disk author doesn't provide single-episode play lists, but there IS manual mode that can let you create such a play list on DVDs. But that doesn't work for BD.

Trigun is relatively simple, in that every episode had 5 chapters except the last. Others are less simple, varying in the number of chapters per episode; Nisekoi is especially bad, since each chapter roughly corresponds to a manga chapter, and there can be 4 to 9 of them per episode. For that, you need to use something like VLC to find the episode boundaries.

I decided to pop in Neon Genesis Evangelion. I have the Platinum pack that went out of print way back, and Handbrake found each episode easily, so I'll start there. So, we know that every episode except the final one is 5 chapters in Trigun, for sure? And if the last is different, how many chapters is it? Just so I know what to do when I reach it.

And when you say manually doing that doesn't work for BD, what does that refer to? Blu-ray Discs? If that was the case, then what would I do? For example if this specific bit here I showed with Trigun happened to have come from a Bluray, what would I have to do to break it up properly? I don't even have a Bluray drive yet so it will be awhile before I can do those, but I want to make sure I know everything I might come up against. I've seen mention of using VLC, but no specifics as to exactly what I would do with that.

Meatbag wrote:I decided to pop in Neon Genesis Evangelion. I have the Platinum pack that went out of print way back, and Handbrake found each episode easily, so I'll start there. So, we know that every episode except the final one is 5 chapters in Trigun, for sure? And if the last is different, how many chapters is it? Just so I know what to do when I reach it.

And when you say manually doing that doesn't work for BD, what does that refer to? Blu-ray Discs? If that was the case, then what would I do? For example if this specific bit here I showed with Trigun happened to have come from a Bluray, what would I have to do to break it up properly? I don't even have a Bluray drive yet so it will be awhile before I can do those, but I want to make sure I know everything I might come up against. I've seen mention of using VLC, but no specifics as to exactly what I would do with that.

VLC will show chapter markers. You can play the single file and notate somewhere where each new episode begins and use that in Handbrake to cut it up into the episodes.

In the case of Trigun, each episode has title, Part A, Part B, ending, preview. Except there is no preview at the end of episode 26...

Most of the classic Evangelion is the same, as is Eureka Seven.

Manual Mode is explained here: /manualdvd/ It is only available for DVDs. BD can have the "all in one" just the same as DVD, but USUALLY there are also separate episode files. But there are a lot of exceptions... Saekano (how to raise a boring girlfriend) has 4 files for 13 episodes, with this chapter layout:

1-5, 6-11, 12-17
1-6, 7-12, 13-17
1-5, 6-10, 11-15
1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-22

It can get interesting when some episodes have prologues and others don't. That happens within the various season of To Love Ru/To Love Ru Darkness, and sometimes one "episode" is actually 2 or 3 mini episodes - do you rip them separately, or together? (I chose together)

To me, figuring this crap out is part of the entertainment value.

Woodstock wrote:There isn't much MakeMKV can do when the disk author doesn't provide single-episode play lists, but there IS manual mode that can let you create such a play list on DVDs.

I don't do anime, so I can't speak about them, but every TV series that I have on DVD has an option to play individual episodes and in many cases a play all option. But, never a play all option without single episode play options. I've authored DVDs and know how easy it is.

So, I used Handbrake to rip disc 1 of Eva. 1 episodes took about 3 hours to finish, and when it was done, the video had a bunch of horizontal lines on everything that moved. Doing a few searches, apparently Handbrake sucks at "interlaced" video files. I won't pretend to know what that means, but I did the same episode in MakeMKV, it took about 2 minutes, and the lines weren't there... So Handbrake seems a no-go.

Is there any way through MKVToolNixGUI that I could go back and split up that Trigun file? Even if I have to do it manually? I still haven't found an explanation for when someone says you can use MKVMerge and VLC to do this. Would be extremely helpful.

Edit: Episode 1 was corrupted somehow. I can play it, but I can't rename or delete it. I thought this was all .MKV files but it was just the one for episode 1. Will have to figure out how to get rid of it.

... every TV series that I have on DVD has an option to play individual episodes and in many cases a play all option.

On the disks in question, from the DVD menu there are links to episodes, which seem to be jumps to specific scenes.

When I still played the DVDs in a player (haven't done that in years!), jumping to, say, episode 2 would continue on to episode 3 when complete.

Meatbag wrote:Doing a few searches, apparently Handbrake sucks at "interlaced" video files.

The level of suckage on interlace depends on options used in HB. It has several de-interlace filters you can use. I typically use "detelecine default" and "deinterlace default", when the source is DVD, and both to OFF if it is BD (BD is USUALLY not interlaced, unless you're doing something from NISAmerica).

Try those options - should be "standard" if you select the "Normal" preset. Anything more than that, and you really need to ask over on forum.handbrake.fr, and you will need the encode logs available to make the request.

As for Explorer crashing, I have not had that problem, but it has been reported before. It depends upon what you have configured to play MKV files; Explorer is rather attached to the idea of OPENING every file to find out what it is when it takes a directory, and the wrong "handler" for MKV can cause it to crash.

As a stop-gap, you can open a CMD prompt and rename files, just remember to put quotes around the names if they have spaces in the file name.

Woodstock wrote:As for Explorer crashing, I have not had that problem, but it has been reported before. It depends upon what you have configured to play MKV files; Explorer is rather attached to the idea of OPENING every file to find out what it is when it takes a directory, and the wrong "handler" for MKV can cause it to crash.

As a stop-gap, you can open a CMD prompt and rename files, just remember to put quotes around the names if they have spaces in the file name.

I was mistaken, in that it was only the file for episode 1 that has this problem. Episodes 2-5 can be renamed fine. Episode 1 is corrupted in some way where it can't be deleted or renamed or anything, but it will play in players just fine. So I have to figure out how to get rid of it, and then I need to re-rip it and see if it happens again.

Ah, there IS a problem that people have from time to time... File names with spaces in bad places. Explorer can show them, but can't do anything with them. But, the CMD prompt CAN.

Open a CMD prompt. Navigate to the drive and directory that has the file. If the file name is something like "Trigun E01.mkv", type "dir tri<TAB>" (<TAB> is the Tab key), which will try to match file names in the directory. You can hit <TAB> again to look at the next match.

You're looking for a file that has a space either before the "." of the extension, or after the extension. Files with spaces or other special characters will have quotes around them, AND be mono-spaced (Explorer likes to use fonts that have variable character widths), so odd spaces are easier to find.

If you find the first episode file has something like that, you can use the command line to rename it or delete it, so long as you enter the correct name within quotes. As in:
It is possible to have a file with a leading space in the name. Shouldn't happen, but it CAN. Doing a simple "dir" will make that show up as a misalignment of the file names. To deal with that situation, use:
Yes, I've dealt with things like this before.

Just for the hell of it, I tried re-ripping the episode with the same name in the same place. The program asked me if I wanted to overwrite, and I said yes. Normally this doesn't work for broken files, but it did for this one. Once it was done, I was able to rename and do whatever with it, and the broken one is no-more.

Now just to figure out how to break apart the big files. See, Handbrake is sort of a solution. The problem is, it takes an hour or more for each individual episode to get done. Whereas each episode takes 2 minutes on MakeMKV. So does anyone know the method mentioned before, where you use VLC Media Player and MKVMerge to break up the episodes from single files? The time it takes Handbrake to process a single episode is just too much. An hour for a 24 minute episode is 5-6 hours for a disc. Meanwhile the Eva series of 26 episodes + the movie was done in about 30 minutes because I didn't need to use the Handbrake step.

What processor in your machine? Handbrake's speed is VERY processor dependent. 4 to 8 cores work best, 2 cores can be excruciating.

If you have an Intel processor with QuickSync Video (QSV) support, it can be blazingly fast, albeit with some loss in compression efficiency (files are 5-10% bigger using QSV hardware than when using the slower software encoder).

The deinterlace process is really a killer of speed when dealing with DVD sources, slowing things by about 30%.

There is supposedly a way to have mkvmerge split on chapters. I didn't see it when I looked, but it would be very fast if it does have that buried in its capabilities.

Alot of people some years ago would refer to using Merge for TV series when looking up this issue, but no one specified how or anything. Just "You can". As for my processor, it's 2 cores at 3.6 ghz. If it's all about the processor, then I guess that explains why it's so slow, but at the same time, the same process in MakeMKV is a tenth the time. Even if I convert an existing MKV file into a smaller MKV file through Handbrake, it takes over an hour per episode. Something about that doesn't seem quite right, proportionally.

I guess I could get a better processor, but it seems like there's a better option buried here somewhere.

MakeMKV does not use a lot of processor power - I've run multiple copies ripping BD on a 2-core Celeron processor with processing power left over.

Handbrake, on the other hand, is doing video recoding, which can push a processor to 100% usage quite easily, and it will keep 6 to 8 "threads" running, which is 3-4 cores on an Intel processor, or 6-8 cores on an AMD processor. And the 100% CPU usage is going to test your system cooling.

If someone will post the magic incantation to make mkvmerge do the split by chapters, I think it would be a benefit for everyone.