www.makemkv.com

Without getting into anything off topic, I used to hold a lifetime license for AnyDVD. Obviously it's now useless, which left me needing to either purchase another license, or look elsewhere.

I'm currently testing MakeMKV with a few titles and wonder if also having AnyDVD would be beneficial in any way or if it's just redundant?

I've read some posts indication that AnyDVD is/was superior with handling playlist obfuscation. I'm not sure if that is the case anymore or not.

I used to use AnyDVD + ClownBD to backup my blurays to .m2ts files, but don't have any objections to using a .MKV file.

Is there any reason for me to purchase another license of AnyDVD, or do I just need a license for MakeMKV?

I use both Redfox AnyDVD and MakeMKV simultaneously; AnyDVD does the decrypting while MakeMKV does...well...makes an .mkv. I prefer this combination. In my opinion, AnyDVD is currently superior to MakeMKV at dealing with playlist obfuscation (better implementation) and is more frequently and quickly updated to handle new copy protection schemes.

Do you need both? Maybe, maybe not, only you can decide, but as I said early, for me, this is a winning combination.

Thanks for your help.

One other question I have surrounds choosing the correct title. I previously used the ClownBD / AnyDVD HD combination and it was very straight forward to choose the correct title. It really only gave you one choice and out of 600 movies I've purchased and backed up, only one was in the wrong order.

Now that I'm experimenting with MakeMKV, I've finding it much more difficult to choose the correct title.

Each movie seems to have 2 or 3 titles that might be the move. For example, this one. Do I choose the one with 28 chapters or the one with 32 chapters?

It depends upon the title. You may be looking at a "theatrical" vs. "director's cut" situation. The box can often tell you which, if there is a difference in length (time).

Thanks Woodstock. That makes sense. The box shows the Theatrical & Unrated version of the film.

How do you determine which is which if you've never seen the movie and can't play it because of the DRM? I'm assuming the only option is to back both of them up and then play through them and try and figure it out?

Personally, I'd rip both and determine which is "better" later.

Kind of like Blade Runner - there are (at least 4) versions of the movie out there, and some releases have all 4. You get different impressions from the film depending on the version you watch. I ended up saving the 1982 theatrical and 2007 "final cut" versions on the media server.

Woodstock wrote:Personally, I'd rip both and determine which is "better" later.

For these Blurays with different editions you can even have all of them in just one mkv file using the Xin1generator program.

As it is described in the Doom9's Forum for that program

If you have a Bluray with multiple editions on one disc (such as Avatar, with the Theatrical, Special Edition, and Director's Cut), it will help you create a single mkv file with all versions of the movie - and allow you to select and play any version, just as you would with the disc. The total file size will usually be slightly larger than the longest version of the movie, and much smaller than ripping each version separately. There's no limit on the number of editions, so you can keep as many as you like.

It uses eac3to to demux the streams, generate a Matroska ordered chapter file, a Matroska tag file, and even generates a file with a list of frames that need to be encoded as I-Frames if re-encoding. Once it has finished demuxing, you use a Matroska muxer (such as MKVMerge or Haali's GDSMux) to create the mkv and add the chapters and tag files.

Question re: Xin1generator

How well does it work if you are going to post-process the file with something like handbrake, which recodes the video? I've experimented with MKV files that do branching (common segments like titles and credits stored in separate MKV files), and only a couple of players supported it, and handbrake DEFINITELY didn't handle it....

Woodstock wrote:Question re: Xin1generator

How well does it work if you are going to post-process the file with something like handbrake, which recodes the video? I've experimented with MKV files that do branching (common segments like titles and credits stored in separate MKV files), and only a couple of players supported it, and handbrake DEFINITELY didn't handle it....

I've never encoded the output of Xin1generator but I think It shoulnt be problematic.

The output is one file for the vídeo (no recoded, same as in MakeMKV), different files for the audio and subtitles, a tag file which is used to identidfy the different editions, and an ordered chapter file which controls the play of different editions (chapters are played (or not) in a different order depending on the edition, but always within the same MKV file.

All these files are joined in a MKV file with MKVToonix.

If you want to recode the vídeo, you could do It before this muxing... (Or even after this muxing, but I'm not sure if Handbrake will keep all the information of tags).

But, recoding the video would break the branching created for the original source, assuming the recoding software (in my case handbrake) could figure out the "combo" file generated by Xin1generator.

But the arguments either way might be moot - Given that a recoding can shrink the file significantly, you could potentially keep multiple versions around while maintaining a space saving. Example: Raw 2D rip of Star Trek Beyond is just under 31GB; Recoded to h264 video, it's just under 6GB.

Both versions of Blade Runner that I keep on my system total 7GB, which is less than half the size of the smallest of the 4 raw files. I don't see from the description how it would work on a title like Blade Runner anyway, since the 4 versions are spread out over 3 disks.

How do things like "smart" TVs deal with the constructed MKV file? What about popular media players (discounting Apple products, because they don't "do" MKV anyway)?

I can see the appeal of having all versions in one file, but I don't see a use case for doing so simply to save file size, given other alternatives.

Woodstock wrote:But, recoding the video would break the branching created for the original source, assuming the recoding software (in my case handbrake) could figure out the "combo" file generated by Xin1generator.

There is no any special in the MKV created by Xin1Generator: Imagine a movie with the normal edition and the edition with alternative end. So, the first edition has the segments 1-2-3 and the altenative the segments 1-2-4. Imagine that you select in the program the "alternative" as main movie and the normal edition as the second edition to be included in the MKV.

So, the MKV created would include all the segments in following order 1-2-4-3 (first the segments of main movie, and following the different segments of next editions). If you see the video, you will have one movie, and after the end credits some parts of the movie, which are used to "create" the other editions.

In order to control which parts of the movie are shown in each edition, MKV ordered chapters are used. For example, if each segment is 10 minutes lenght:

-Edition1
chapter 1 - Start 00:00:00.0000 - End 00:10:00.000
chapter 2 - Start 00:10:00.0000 - End 00:20:00.000
chapter 3 - Start 00:20:00.0000 - End 00:30:00.000
- Edition2
chapter 1 - Start 00:00:00.0000 - End 00:10:00.000
chapter 2 - Start 00:10:00.0000 - End 00:20:00.000
chapter 3 - Start 00:30:00.0000 - End 00:40:00.000

Note that when playing "edition 2", first two chapters are the same as edition 1, but third chapter starts in minute 30 (instead of in minute 20 of edition 1).

When you are recoding, you are recoding a video file, with no information about the branching, which is stored in the xml file of chapters (which is not recoded).

Additionaly, the program generates a file with a list of frames that need to be encoded as I-Frames if re-encoding, but I really don't know how to used (as I don't recode).

Woodstock wrote:But the arguments either way might be moot - Given that a recoding can shrink the file significantly, you could potentially keep multiple versions around while maintaining a space saving. Example: Raw 2D rip of Star Trek Beyond is just under 31GB; Recoded to h264 video, it's just under 6GB.

I agree with you that if you are compressing so much the movie, it is not necessary to "save space" keeping different editions of the movie in the same MKV file. Hovewer, I do not recode the movie, and when keeping the "raw" information of the bluray, the space saved can be several Gb.

Woodstock wrote:Both versions of Blade Runner that I keep on my system total 7GB, which is less than half the size of the smallest of the 4 raw files. I don't see from the description how it would work on a title like Blade Runner anyway, since the 4 versions are spread out over 3 disks.

In this case (different editions in different disks) the program is useless. It is only valid when different editions are in just one disk.

Woodstock wrote:How do things like "smart" TVs deal with the constructed MKV file? What about popular media players (discounting Apple products, because they don't "do" MKV anyway)?

The only requirement is that the player must "understand" the "ordered chapters". When playing in a computer there is no problem, since VLC, MPCHC, and any program using Haali Splitter understand this information.

However, when playing in other "hardware" devices surely the "ordered chapters" are not taken into account, so it is not possible to access the alternative editions. But not all is lost: As the first (main) movie is correctly ordered in the MKV, it can be played in any device. In this situation, after the end credits some additional scenes will be shown, but this does not affect to the main movie.

I thought MakeMKV explicitly said disable AnyDVD if its running because it causes problems?

Also I have never had issues with MakeMKV being able to deal with any disk.

necrosis wrote:I thought MakeMKV explicitly said disable AnyDVD if its running because it causes problems?

Also I have never had issues with MakeMKV being able to deal with any disk.

In the many years of using both at the same time, I've never run into problems, certainly not any that have created unplayable .mkv files.

I've also used MakeMKV to de-encrypt on a few occasions (and it does work well) but for me, it's a preference thing; I prefer AnyDVD's support for playlist obfuscation and AnyDVD usually deals with newer protection schemes/problem discs more quickly.