makemkvcon selection profile on headless machine

Discussion of advanced MakeMKV functionality, expert mode, conversion profiles
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Heatvent
Posts: 6
Joined: Wed Sep 13, 2023 12:50 am

makemkvcon selection profile on headless machine

Post by Heatvent » Wed Sep 13, 2023 1:07 am

After trying to figure this out and searching around a bunch of older posts that don't seem to be relevant or newer ones that were not answered, I am appealing for help in my dilemma understand track selection profiles for makemkvcon.

IT seems like if you have the GUI installed, you are supposed to edit the default profile in the GUI ... great.

However, if you are using a headless/no GUI machine, there is no discussion on how to edit the profile for makemkvcon. There are old posts about importing profiles (--profile=[path]), but this seems to be deprecated.

Can someone either point me to a post or other instructions explaining how this can be done. Alternatively, feel free to explain in this thread. I'm sure at the end of the day this can be done and is hopefully straightforward. I have already determined the changes for the selection profile, I just need to pass it to makemkvcon to follow it.

Thanks!

Heatvent
Posts: 6
Joined: Wed Sep 13, 2023 12:50 am

Re: makemkvcon selection profile on headless machine

Post by Heatvent » Thu Sep 14, 2023 2:31 am

It never fails. Only after posting the question can I seem to stumble on the answer. I first found this post that said settings are stored in different locations for different OSs...

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=22689&p=93341&hili ... rol#p93341

So I made some changes to the GUI preferences for "Default Selection Profile" and low and behold they got populated in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MakeMKV in the app_DefaultSelectionString setting.

I then went to my ARM machine and opened settings.conf in the /home/arm/.MakeMKV directory and added the following setting:

app_DefaultSelectionString = "whatever selection logic you want"

And voila, it is working. Very straightforward once you figure this out but otherwise not obvious. My understanding is MakeMKV went away from using the profile file because of a couple of possible reasons. One is the file would/could be in the MakeMKV application directory and would get overwritten or deleted when updated. There may also have been challenges for MakeMKV to figure out which profile setting to use when multiple profiles existed in the directory.

Hope this helps someone else.

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