www.makemkv.com

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to rip my copy of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" animated series Blu-ray discs. Usually each episode shows up as a separate title and file when ripped. (This is true for seasons 1,2 and 4.) My season 3 and 4 discs show only one title that contains all of the episodes run together which results in one big MKV file. Is this just how the disc was made or is there something I need to do or change to get it to separate the episodes into separate titles and files?

Thanks in advance.

Others have reported that the format of the disks changed between seasons. On the DVDs, you can use "manual mode" to tell MakeMKV to split on the chapters, but with the BDs, your choices start with ripping the large file, then either using somethign like MKVmerge to write the appropriate chapters out to separate MKV files, OR, if you use handbrake, to set up jobs to separate the chapters there.

I just went through this with Sword Art Online II - the first two disks were just "one big file", but the last 3 had both one big file and individual chapters. Don't know yet what the last two will have - those won't be here until January.

Or you could do it the fun way.

Do a complete backup of the disc, then mux the m2ts files directly using MKVMerge.

Point at the playlist using eac3to to extract the chapters, then split it into the necessary parts. Then look at each episode using AVIDemux or AVISynth/VirtualDub and add the chapters back in manually using MKVToolNIxGUI.

That's what I'm doing at the moment while I'm ripping the first season of Iron Man: Armored Adventures for the umpteenth time.

Thanks for the replies...

I used the MKVToolNix GUI program to split the file into smaller files. I just used VLC to find the time stamps of where I wanted the the split to occur and plugged that info into MKVToolNix and it voilà. MKVToolNix even kept the correct chapter markers in the split files. This ended up being easier than anticipated. I was worried I would have to use some video editor and scan to find the break points and copy and paste it into a new file.

Thanks for the help.

"On the DVDs, you can use "manual mode" to tell MakeMKV to split on the chapters"...

Ok - good, but where I can find the "manual mode" ? On the DVD ??? I can't figure out how ? I try to extract files separately but I just can't. Is there any difference between the demo and the registered version ? The software is awesome but If a can't extract the chapters one by one it's really disappointing.

Guess I forgot to include the link: http://www.makemkv.com/manualdvd/

Manual mode isn't easy for first time users. Heck, I've only used it a couple of times without Mike's help, and screwed them up.

Which is why I opt for extracting the larger file, then using handbrake to split the episodes out as part of processing the files to go on the media server. Frankly, DVD video is poorly compressed, so converting it to h.264 encoding makes room for more room for video on the server, so I do not try to be fancy with getting things "just right" with MakeMKV. "Rip it all, sort it out later" is my method.

It's funny, I found this thread looking for a way to rip this exact collection ("Clone Wars").

Thing is, my Season 1 was individual episodes, but Season 2 discs seem to have one big file so far.

I'd like to request the ability to rip groups of chapters into individual files directly from MakeMKV.

I know that isn't trivial, but it would be extremely helpful to not have to use additional tools to do this.

Handbrake is great, but I'm trying to preserve the content here and don't want to transcode/re-encode.

Thanks,

-Wes

With DVDs, you have that... /manualdvd/

But it isn't always simple. And Bluray doesn't allow it.

Thanks Woodstock,

I saw that.

I'm using mkvtoolnix (aka mkvmerge) to do this with my BluRay rips, and it's as simple as saying "split before chapters 5,9,13,17,21,25,29"

It's not terrible, but it is a bit frustrating having to use MakeMKV to rip the title then passing it though mkvtoolnix after that...

-Wes

waldo22 wrote:Thing is, my Season 1 was individual episodes, but Season 2 discs seem to have one big file so far.

Have looked at the disc contents? Is there really a single M2TS file that is about 40GB?

@MrVideo,

I'm glad you posted that.

The 7 episodes are in 7 separate .m2ts files of 3 - 3.5 GiB, with 4 chapters each.

MakeMKV reads them as one 21.4GB title with 28 chapters.

The chapter information is stored in separate meta files, though, so how do I keep the chapter info? Or I don't?

waldo22 wrote:MakeMKV reads them as one 21.4GB title with 28 chapters.

Interesting. If you play the Blu-ray, don't you get the option to play the individual episodes? I've never heard of an authored released that didn't provide that option. If so, that means there are 7 playlists corresponding to the episodes.

That said, it is not impossible for them to create a menu structure that jumps into the file at the particular chapter. I've not authored a Blu-ray, but I suspect that it is possible to set a register value that is looked at when the episode completes to determine if it returns to the menu or goes on to play the next episode. There is a lot of power in Blu-ray authoring.

One way to know for sure is to use BDInfo on the disc and look at the playlists, matching M2TS files against them.

In other words, a little detective work is needed.

Correction: BDEdit, not BDinfo.

It's really interesting, I used BDEdit and it found one playlist (0100) with 7 PlayItems and 29 PlayListMarks.

It looks like that's the only way to play the 7 episodes.

Bummer.

MKVToolnix is working well for this, but it would be nice to have this natively in MakeMKV.

Just wanted to chime in and say that the MKVToolnix (mkvmerge) option works great. Recommend using the portable installation for Windows users to bypass the whole Program Files access issues, and use the following command prompt in either CMD or Powershell:
Rinse and repeat for any other large-file sources and you're good to go!

BONUS: Apparently ChatGPT has indexed the complete documentation for MKVToolnix, so you can ask it to help you generate specific prompts. Scary...but cool!

Cheers!
-Ravik-