www.makemkv.com

Hello there my friends...

Community Intro (1st Post):
I come from another era, (late 1990s-up to around 2019-2020 right before covid-19) were Nero Burning ROM, ImgBurn, Ashampoo was a thing... (Specially Nero since ever) I recently returned from the dead and I will be receiving 2 ASUS BW-16D1HT Blu-Ray burners next week from Amazon along with a bunch of Discs (100GB/50GB/M-Discs etc) and I already have the 3.10MK bin here ready to flash... (Hardcore user since ever, lol)

The Question:
Which software do you guys recommend now in 2025... is Nero still relevant? (like the #1 thing?) I will mostly be burning Matroska videos (.MKV) and some old AVI/MP4 videos. (and some personal Data files) no Blu-Ray/DVD/CD ripping... (but if you can comment on ripping software too... just in case, it would also be appreciated) I just want to have an idea of what's still relevant or new now.

Thanks in advance!

ImgBurn believe or not is still the most complete for burning Blu-ray since it can create UDF 2.5 compliant discs. If you're not going to burn UDF 2.5 discs or discs that need to play in set-top players, then I *think* just about anything will do (although I'm not sure how layer breaks are handled for 50GB+ BDR discs by burning applications). Sadly, you shouldn't burn any Blu-rays as the disc blanks are unreliable. Basically, don't burn anything.

For ripping Blu-ray or DVD, MakeMKV or DVDfab (www.dvdfab.cn).

dBpoweramp (dbpoweramp.com) is as far as I can tell the most complete audio CD ripping program but it's commercial and Windows/Mac only. I've never used it because I'm content with almost any CD ripping software. Right now I use Whipper (https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper). I really don't know if there's an application that can rip _ALL_ data from _ALL_ audio CDs but again, if it exists it's probably dBpoweramp (but probably in combination with some obscure ancient CD/DVD-ROM drive :-/).

Optical media is long dead so there really hasn't been any advancement in the ripping or burning applications in many years and I seriously doubt there will be in the future.

One thing I noticed: Nero Burning Rom has the option to enable Defect management for blu-rays. I do not think other software is capable of this. I had to use this for crappy double-layer 50 GB BD-Rs made by Mediarange. The problem was that they recorded OK but failed to read back on layers break. Only Defect management in Nero fixed this problem reducing capacity a bit. And I tried both Pioneer and ASUS burners - no difference. My final decision was to throw them away and never touch anything else apart from Verbatim, if possible only single layer HTL BD-Rs like 43804 package. But I do not burn any movies. They are too large. I just buy original blu-ray movie discs. That serves as a very good optical archive as well.