www.makemkv.com

Hi at all,

I have the problem that almost every MKV has frame drops in various places every few minutes after ripping. I'm using a MacBook Pro M3 and a Verbatim 43888 external 4K drive and I have no idea where to start troubleshooting or what the problem might be.

Where do you think the source of the problem is? Do you think MakeMKV is somehow dropping frames as it reads the bytes on the optical disc and puts them into a .mkv file? If so, using ffprobe you can count the number of frames in both the resulting .mkv file and the source .m2ts file (assuming the source is a single .m2ts file). https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2017843/fetch-frame-count-with-ffmpeg

A more likely scenario is your playback software is dropping a frame from time to time.

I have now analyzed it with ffprobe and it seems to me that these error messages are the problem. What could be the reason?

It seems to me that the following user had the same problem: viewtopic.php?t=32671

Here are the error messages:

Is it your playback software that's producing those messages? What software are you using?

The other poster said MakeMKV didn't indicate any errors during the rip. Is that your experience as well?

With MakeMKV there were no error messages, exactly.

I think I was able to solve it. I analyzed the files with ffprobe as suggested, here I had some error messages in the following format:

[matroska, webm
- 0x14d8051d0] 0x00 at pos 2444132609 (0x91ae8101) invalid as first byte of an EBML number

Handbrake then showed me a message in the activity log in the form of "dropped frame" or similar when encoding these files.

I have now found out that it is due to the exFAT formatted SSD on the MacBook. Apparently the Mac doesn't like this. I have now formatted the SSD in Apple's own AFPS format and everything seems to be working now. Ffprobe no longer shows me any errors and the video files run through without any problems.

Thanks for your advice with ffprobe.