www.makemkv.com

I don't know if this is a MakeMKV bug or an XBMC bug, but I've been dealing with it for a long time and it's driving me crazy! I'm using most current versions of both programs. What happens is this:

I will have a movie I want to rip. I start the ripping process, and then I want to watch something in XBMC. Immediately after I start XBMC my rip freezes up/pauses in MakeMKV. It will just sit there for about a minute or more and then one of two things will happen, either it will give a read error and the process will fail (then I have to start the rip over from the beginning), or the second thing is whatever brain fart it had seems to pass and then the rip will continue on like nothing happened. Starting with immediately after opening XBMC the optical drive will make a terrible grinding sound and the read light stops flashing. It will grind away for a long time and as I said before it will either resume in MakeMKV after the long pause like nothing happened or it will fail.

So, there is obviously something in XBMC that scans for or polls my drive on startup that is interrupting MakeMKV while I'm ripping. I tend to look at this as a MakeMKV bug because if it was properly locking the drive, no other programs or the OS should be able to access the drive and certainly not to the capacity of it interrupting another program from reading the disc. Unfortunately I don't see an option in XBMC to tell it to leave my drive alone and do nothing with it on startup (I don't use it for discs, only to view my MKVs). So, can MakeMKV do better at locking the drive from other processes?

Before anyone asks, no there is nothing wrong with my drive, etc. It works perfectly. I have no issues using either MakeMKV or XBMC and have no problems with this issue when the programs are used separately. This only occurs when opening XBMC during the middle of a rip with MakeMKV. This is repeatable and as I said I've been dealing with it a long time. I'd prefer to not have to start XBMC first then start a rip later, or if I'm in the middle of a rip, I'd rather not have to wait for it to finish in order to fire up XBMC to watch another movie in fear that my rip will get interrupted. Also, I'll mention that sometimes when this event occurs and the rip fails, I have a hell of a time trying to get MakeMKV to read the disc again. It's like it's stuck in permanent brain fart mode and even restarting the PC doesn't help. I usually will have to eject the tray and reboot, or power off before things go back to normal. It's just the weirdest thing. Anyone else run into this or have a workaround until a solution is implemented?

MakeMKV can't 'lock' a drive, that would be silly. A program can lock a file for writing, but if they could lock an entire drive then any program could lock the main boot drive at will.

-Edit- I Guess you can http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... S.85).aspx but MakeMKV most definitely doesn't. I can access a drive with any program while MakeMKV is at work.

While I appreciate the response, you obviously don't have a clue what you're talking about. It's pretty standard that an application lock an optical drive while it is in use such as while burning or ripping for this exact problem I am having to be prevented. I am looking for a response directly from Mike.

So I started XBMC with a bluray in the drive without MakeMKV running and sure enough on startup it spins up the disc briefly. Maybe it is just seeing if a disc is in there. So this is causing MakeMKV to fail in the middle of a rip because the drive isn't locked, denying access to other programs like it should be doing.

Does it happen with DVD or Blu-ray? If DVD, then XBMC likely tries to run DVD auth on the drive, and that "disables" the drive in a process. MakeMKV indeed is not "locking" the drive, so other applications can bring it into unusable state...

It doesn't matter what type of disc is in the drive. XBMC spins up the drive no matter what.

So you've confirmed MakeMKV doesn't lock the volume when it is in use which it should absolutely be doing for long operations like ripping.

Are you going to fix this in the next version? This literally should take hardly any time at all and only a few lines of code.

Just downloaded 1.8.11 and this bug annoyingly still exists. Please have MakeMKV lock the volume it is actively ripping from.