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I recently started ripping blu-ray disks after doing a lot of DVDs and the issue with multiple titles all looking the same is throwing me for a loop. I've seen discussion about this being from multiple regions/languages/audio tracks but I have some (Babe has 2, every star wars I've tried have 4) that really look the same as far as I can tell, all with full quality English audio tracks and the same foreign tracks. I remember reading somewhere that sometimes they'll throw in titles that play out of order to confuse people trying to rip the disks so I'm obviously intent on not saving those by mistake. With the DVD rips I could load the iso up in VLC, navigate to the movie using the DVD menus, check what title was being played, then just grab that title in handbrake and it was good to go. I haven't been able to load the blu-ray rip into VLC to duplicate my DVD solution. Is there a good way to know what title to grab when they all look the same? Apologies if this is documented somewhere but I haven't found an acceptable solution after lots of digging. For what it's worth my plan is to save full quality MKVs for movies and do handbrake compressions on TV show episodes to save some space. Thanks so much for the help!

What vendor are the BDs from?

Disney and related vendors typically have two or three copies of the main feature, one for each language on the disk.

Lionsgate and related companies like to put hundreds of fake titles on a disk, with scenes mixed up, to discourage ripping. You need to know which one is correct to extract it. Sometimes you can pinpoint the correct title by knowing what the EXACT runtime is.

Thanks so much for the reply!

Woodstock wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 28, 2023 4:07 pm

What vendor are the BDs from?

Disney and related vendors typically have two or three copies of the main feature, one for each language on the disk.

I just had a good laugh about this. It's Star Wars--force awakens, last Jedi, and solo. I made MKVs out of the 3 main feature titles for force awakens and had myself convinced they were the same (all English dialogue from checking the middle of the movie) until I watched far enough of the beginning to see the "a long time ago...." screen in SPANISH. I guess problem solved, for now. Thanks again!

Hi.
I've yet to find a solution for this problem, too. Currently, I've got the Alita - Battle Angel UHD and it has like 9 titles. Luckily it seems only to be a text right after the Sony Logo, which got it's own, translated version (e.g. 00805.mpls contains the german one), so I was able to find it fast. Pixar movies also make translated versions of texts in picture (at 7:57 into the movie the "Monsters University" archway on the entrance is translated to "Monster Universität" for germany) and there seems to be no fast solution to get the right one.

Like Woodstock said, they put copies for each language on the discs, though not the entire movie. They cut the movie into parts, some are the same for every language, like the majority of a movie, one big or a few bigger chunks. Others contain a hard translated text, like the typical story intro in Star Wars, they make a short piece of video for each language for this part only (typically english, french, spanish, german, portugese, italian, polish, and so on).

The playlist (0080#.mpls) contains the correct order of these chunks for the player to play, based on the chosen language. But here is the problem: It's not always the same number for each language. If there's an easy and fast way to find out which playlist is which language, I haven't found it yet.

For Disney stuff, 800 is almost always English.

If you've made a decrypted backup of the disc, it is relatively easy to check which is which before making a .mkv file. Open the decrypted backup and highlight a title. On the right, in the info box there will be a bunch of details about the title, including the 'segment map'. The segment map is an ordered list of numbers that correspond to the .m2ts files that make up that title. .m2ts files can be found in the /BDMV/STREAM/ folder of the decrypted backup. Lots of players, including VLC, can play these files.

If you compare the segment maps of two or three titles with one another, you'll see which segments are the same and which segments are different between the titles. Play the segments that are different to find the language you're looking for.