www.makemkv.com

I see that MakeMKV can have more than one instance running on Windows 10. Can it rip multiple discs simultaneously?

Yes.

Thanks much @Woodstock.

camelotbob wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 08, 2020 1:45 pm

I see that MakeMKV can have more than one instance running on Windows 10. Can it rip multiple discs simultaneously?

To facilitate this, check "Ask for single drive mode" on the IO preferences tab. This asks you to assign a specific optical drive to each instance of MakeMKV & avoids conflicts.

Thanks for this info as well @d00zah.

While being able to run multiple copies of MakeMKV, all pointing to a different drive, is awesome, the fact that the program settings are saved centrally is very bad. It means that changing anything in one instance of the program also affects every other instance of the program even if the MakeMKV programs are run from unique folders.

This is quite frustrating. It would be much better if MakeMKV offered a 'Don't use APPDATA' option like Notepad++ does so that all settings could be stored in a config file in the program folder.

So while you can indeed run multiple copies of MakeMKV, MakeMKV isn't very friendly when doing that.

It's a different approach but if you're going to convert your MKV files to MP4, I actually found that HandBrake has a better approach to multiple drive rips.

Put your discs in your drives, open HandBrake and open each drive in turn as a source (within the same HandBrake session, no need to open multiple instances of HandBrake). For each disc, add the titles that you want. So when you have added titles for disc 1, open disc 2 as source and add titles for that, etc.

Once you are done adding titles from all discs, start your queue and off it goes.

This does only rip one disc at a time but that's not important because it's also encoding to MP4, which you would normally only do one file at a time anyway (because HandBrake will use all the CPU power it can for each file).

Using HandBrake to rip is actually beneficial in another way. Some titles (for example, TV episodes), merge all the episodes together into one title so you open the disc in HandBrake (or MakeMKV) and it shows one file of 6 hours long instead of 6 files at 30 minutes long.

With MakeMKV, you can specify the chapters using Expert mode by entering the title and chapter numbers (such as 1:1-6 means title 1 chapters 1-6). This is OK but first you need to know which chapters you need.

If you rip with HandBrake, chapter selection is much easier (just choose from the dropdown menu) and you can preview the chapters from within HandBrake so it's much easier to work out which chapters you need to rip for each title. I'm actually having to use HandBrake to rip some TV episode DVDs just because of this reason alone.

But the main thing to take away is that HandBrake's approach to multiple rips is much better. Put all discs in all drives, open one instance of HandBrake and use it to open each disc in turn and add titles from each disc. All in one instance and one queue.

MakeMKV should really be this simple where, instead of asking which drive you want the current copy of MakeMKV to work with (and then fighting over the centralised settings which affect all copies of MakeMKV), you just use one instance of MakeMKV to open each drive in turn and add the files from each drive.

I really used to love MakeMKV when I only had one optical drive for ripping and I often thought about spending the £51 to thank the author for such a splendid job. But ever since I got myself 3 optical drives, MakeMKV is just giving me so many problems that I'm not even sure I'll keep using it.

Hm...
I use handbrake as well, but I don't use it to rip. MakeMKV runs my 4 drives in parallel and all 4 drives are the same speed as 1 drive to complete, so I can complete my rips 4 times faster with MakeMKV then I could with Handbrake.

Since there is no processing the processor limits don't apply and while ripping 4 instances my computer is running 5-10% using MakeMKV. Of course if you want to rip and re-encode at once Handbrake may be better, but I want to separate those so I rip first then later, I run handbrake as you suggest.

d00zah wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 08, 2020 8:35 pm

To facilitate this, check "Ask for single drive mode" on the IO preferences tab. This asks you to assign a specific optical drive to each instance of MakeMKV & avoids conflicts.

This is really important and makes life much easier. Otherwise there can be thrashing while the second instance of MakeMKV attempts to read the disc from the first instance which can lead to the first instance failing.

biospot wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 14, 2020 8:47 pm

I use handbrake as well, but I don't use it to rip. MakeMKV runs my 4 drives in parallel and all 4 drives are the same speed as 1 drive to complete, so I can complete my rips 4 times faster with MakeMKV then I could with Handbrake

This is one heck of a selling point!

Follow on question to this thread...

I have 8 optical drives in my system and MakeMKV does an awesome job ripping DVDs and BDs from them.

Is there a way to run a batch file (or similar) to have Windows 10 open 8 MakeMKV GUI instances, each assigned to a unique drive?

Thanks