www.makemkv.com

I have installed Windows 8 and the latest MakeMKV can not make MKVs anymore. I suspect that it's because of file path names.

The strange thing is that MakeMKV sees the file paths with / instead of \. For example I see MakeMKV trying to write
to D:/FOLDER/file.mkv instead of D:\FOLDER\file.mkv!!

Is this the problem? Is this new specific to Windows 8?

For Windows NT up through Win7, the operating system itself accepts either / or \ in paths... which is why "/" is an illegal character within a file name. This was for compatibility with Unix programs that might be compiled to run under NT.

The limitation on use of / is when you are dealing with CMD.EXE (think batch files), which was trying to be compatible with COMMAND.COM on DOS... But DOS also accepted / or \, which allowed me to irritate a lot of people back in the "the old days" with a small change to COMMAND.COM's "switch" character setting....

But a command line program CAN use "/" in paths it sends to Windows itself, through the application interface.

No experience with Win8 to say whether or not Microsoft decided to break this behavior after 20+ years... If they did, it would screw up a LOT of cross-platform programs out there!

It may be that Win8 is enforcing access to the hardware more strictly. Try running it with administrator privileges, to see if it functions.

Thanks. Tried it as admin and yes now it works.

So if you launch it normal in Windows 8 it doesn't work.

That means Win8 is enforcing the access-to-hardware restrictions. My Win7 machines have never complained about this, but I am in the administrator group for them, so it just might be me.

MakeMKV needs direct access to the interface to allow for things like decoding CSS without Windows' permission.