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I am trying to create episodes from Season 3 of Medium

This season has a "Play All" feature on each disk, which will play all the episodes back to back.

That's fine and dandy, except MakeMKV doesn't see the individual episodes at all! Just the one large combined-episode version.

Please Help!

This is because the episodes are all part of one title - I see it a lot. If you decide to watch a particular individual episode, it just starts playing from the appropriate chapter, and plays to the end of the title.

I've usually just named the whole file as being "E01-07" when I rename them. If something really bothers me, I can break them up using Handbrake to encode the collection of chapters that make up an episode.

Yes, but I just did another series that had that same setup, and MakeMKV sees BOTH: the "Play All" as one big title, and ALSO the individual episodes!

I've avoided using handbrake because I don't want to re-encode or compress it, I just want to pick out the episodes. Can handbrake do that? I guess I will go download it and find out!

That's a new one - I've had sets that changed from "all in one" to "separate episodes" between disks, but not one that had both on the same disk.

I use handbrake because it does re-encode. However, you can tell it to use MPEG2 for the video encoding, and the output can be either MP4 or MKV containers.

For leaving it as MKV, no re-encode, there are a number of tools that will let you split the MKV by chapters. I haven't looked at them, because they weren't what I needed. I had been leaving everything as MKV files until Handbrake started supporting DVD subtitles in MP4 files, then I went on a massive recode binge to cut the size of the files on the media server. That, and some of the viewers only support MP4 via DLNA, so content had to change.

I got handbrake, I just don't see how break it up. How do I know which chapters are the ending and beginning of each episode?

Guess until get it right???

Woodstock wrote:However, you can tell it to use MPEG2 for the video encoding

That's a very bad idea. Average MPEG-2 encoder with super-fast, low-quality defaults vs. state-of-the-art, highly-configurable H.264 encoder

Romansh, it might be a bad idea, but it what was asked for....

gtfoltz, once you open the file in Handbrake, you will see a range of chapters to encode. It defaults to all in the file. You can select the start and end chapters for each episode, then click "Add to queue" to put them in the job list.

Actually, "Chapters" can be either "Seconds" or "Frames", but chapters is what you're looking for.

The number of chapters per episode varies with what you've ripped; some of the stuff I have varies from 1 chapter per episode, up to 7 (think intro, titles, segment 1, segment 2, credits, scenes from next episode, additional credits) or more.

Woodstock wrote:Romansh, it might be a bad idea, but it what was asked for....

The OP said that he doesn't want to re-encode, not that he wants the output to be MPEG-2.

gtfoltz wrote:Yes, but I just did another series that had that same setup, and MakeMKV sees BOTH: the "Play All" as one big title, and ALSO the individual episodes!

I've avoided using handbrake because I don't want to re-encode or compress it, I just want to pick out the episodes. Can handbrake do that? I guess I will go download it and find out!

Some DVDs are made in a way that makes this easier than others.

The bad way is to have all the episodes in a single VTS set, the DVD menu is able to jump to a specific episode by jumping to a chapter in that single VTS set, and is able to play the whole lot as one by playing from the beginning.

The good way is to have each episode in individual VTS sets. The DVD menu can play an individual episode, or again play the lot by playing the first and then automatically jumping to the second, etc.

The good way makes it easy for MakeMKV to detect and extract episodes individually, but the bad way means MakeMKV is likely to treat it all as one movie.

It is possible to extract an episode from the bad kind of DVD but you may have to search out a suitable tool. They way I did it was to use DVD2OneX (for Mac) to extract a set of chapters to a new custom VIDEO_TS folder. One can then use MakeMKV with this new custom VIDEO_TS folder. You can identify which chapters correspond to an episode by using VLC to play the DVD. DVD2OneX would not re-encode the video and can keep the subtitles, audio tracks, and chapter markers (of the set of chapters you extract).

I believe an example of a bad DVD set is "Fullmetal Alchemist" an Anime TV series.

I use mkvmerge to split the file from a "play all" type of DVD.