www.makemkv.com

I have been using MakeMKV for a few years and I love it. However I am one of those people who want lossless everything. Three things always throw me off.

The first is that quite often there are multiple titles, many of which are the same size and duration. Now, I can't quite figure out how to post pictures here yet, but I often just choose the first. Right now I'm looking at the new Princess Mononoke Bluray, and the first title (00800.mpls) is the only one with a numerically correct segment map. In this case 1001, 1002, 1003, 1004, and 1005. The other (00801.mpls) is 1001, 1006, etc. I know that this can often have to do with anti ripping measures, but sometimes it's hard to tell.

The other issue I often run into is what is pre-selected. Whenever I open up a file in MakeMKV it always chooses the subsequent audio file instead. In Princess Mononoke's case it defaults to choosing DTS Surround 5.1 English. I always change it to the first, in this case it's DTS-HD MA Surround 5.1 English.

The final issue has to do with subtitles. I almost always just choose both the English and English (forced only). I have run into a few problems doing this, but it seems to work out. Am a choosing the correct choices? Or do I just need to watch the MKV and Bluray simultaneously until I know for sure? Thanks.

Edit:

One thing I forgot has to do with MPC. Whenever I watch movies there I have this random Forced Subtitle option that doesn't appear in VLC, nor does it actually contain anything. It's odd and I would like to figure out how to get rid of it. I usually end up using mkvmerge to change around the language orders.

-sel:all,+sel:english,-sel:core

...if you don't mind commentaries and descriptive audios as well. Otherwise adding -sel:havelossless would work for most discs... most... there's no actual rules for how Blu Ray tracks should be configured so I prefer to rip all tracks in my language and sort them out with VLC and MKVMerge afterwards (of course that only works if the tracks have the right language assigned to them... I wonder how many "und" tracks I've missed...)

The only way to know what's in any track (or title) is to actually watch them. Some movies have English Subtitles first, some have SDH first, the only way to know which is which is to watch them. It's the same with forced subtitles, sometimes they're mixed in with another subtitle track and have to be split into their own track to be put in an MKV (hence the "force only" subtitles tracks attached to each Blu Ray subtitle track), sometimes they have their own track and the "forced only" track simply becomes a duplicate of the parent. There are also production note subtitles, commentary subtitles and other "miscellaneous" subtitles the variety of which are limited only by the imaginations of the discs producers.


... really, watch the things and get experience because we can't tell you what to do.

http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4386

MakeMKV adds a forced subtitle track to each subtitle track taken from a Blu Ray, if it turns out there are no forced subtitles in the parent track MakeMKV removes that track from the header. If MPC is showing an extra track and VLC isn't, all I can think of is that either MPC creates it's own "forced subtitle" track for PGS subtitles OR somehow it's finding the deleted track entry in the file and displaying it as an actual track.

Weird handling of subtitle tracks is one reason I run everything through handbrake before putting it on the media server. I have some titles that have only one subtitle track, but it doesn't differentiate between "forced" and "regular". The only way to keep the media players from displaying the subtitle track all the time is to have handbrake insert a "forced only" subtitle track that is empty, overriding MakeMKV's stripping of empty forced tracks.

Also, I have MakeMKV rip ALL audio tracks, and use handbrake to sort them out. I purchased a bunch of disks from Malaysia where the 4 "english" audio tracks were actually Japanese, English, Chinese, and Malay. And the first "english" subtitle track was actually Chinese.