first of all - please, forgive my english, because it isnt my mother language (which is german).
Secondly - if this is the wrong area i had put this posting, please, moderators/admins, move it to the according one...
- thank youAnd now to the reason of this posting...
I know that i'm the "new one" here (just registered for doing THIS posting) and that those mentioned versions (1.15.3 & 1.15.4) are absolutely outdated, but since i started using MakeMKV via commandline (for better handling and less typing all the time while using 2 DVD-drives in one PC) a few weeks ago with the newest version availabe (1.17.9 - to convert all my self-made DVDs i made when we had pay-tv in Germany (which is quite an amount) to MKVs for better handling and watching them via a dedicated hardware media player), i was always wondering why some DVDs took about 7 minutes, while others needed even more than 15 minutes - for the same amount of data (lets say 4GB). Well, i shrugged it off - it is, what it is...
It appeared to me that something might be off, when i had a DVD at hand that contained 11 (!) small documentaries (about 9-10 minutes running time each) - each resulting MKV with about 400MB in size, because this disc was done in about 4 minutes.
Something seemed odd about that (why that large range of needed time for the same amount of data?) - so i did some tests, copied 2 DVDs on hard drive A and let them "convert" to MKV to hard drive B.
I could see clearly how the program started off fine with speeds about 65MB/sec and then dropping down to 5-6 MB/sec. This shouldnt happen AT ALL! But this observation went hand-in-hand with the one i made with the DVD-drive... the behaviour of the "working LED" of the DVD drive. Continously green at the beinning and blinking (and blinking even slowing down) the more % of that title were written on the disc.
Okay - that's odd...
I even made sure that both hard drives were defragmented so that there was no issue from this - but that didnt help either.
So i looked closer while i was ripping from A -> B - and saw something strange happening...
About 500MB of ripping - the speed dropped from starting originally 65MB/sec to the mentioned 5-6MB/sec - and when there was another title on that DVD, it started all over at 65MB/sec and then dropped at the 500MB-mark down to 5-6MB/sec again.
And this led me to one conclusion... it was NOT about the READ speed... it's about the WRITE speed (or at least the handling of the MKV file itself). Something slows down the writing while handling the MKV that is in the making, as it gets bigger and bigger. Which means that the DVD drive didnt slow down because it didnt read well the disc - it had to slow down because the system wasnt able to handle all the data whysoever.
Long story short - i downloaded, installed and tested several older versions (with and without restart of the PC), starting with 1.17.6 (as suggested by some members because it worked for them) - but to no avail.
Last but not least - after 2 hrs of installing back and forth several versions and testing extraction speeds - i was able to determine the "breaking point" when switching from 1.15.3
(barreling fast - writing that 3,5 GB file within a minute from A to B) to 1.15.4 (and all versions with higher numbers after that) which showed the slow and odd behaviour as described above.I know, those versions are quite outdated, but since those performance issues come up every now and then reported by other users - can some of the developers look into the changelog for the mentioned 1.15.4, and think for a moment about it, if there was any change made from 1.15.3, that could have an impact on the MKV-file handling performance?
And could some of those members plagued with low speeds do the test with the versions mentioned above?
Maybe together we can narrow it somehow down to a version switch that points to the cause of all of it?
Regards from Germany...
Ralph