Question to all: MakeMKV without GUI, console only

[mike admin]

Hi Everyone.

Please give me some feedback if you are using MakeMKV without GUI, only the console app. This applies to any OS, but most of you do this on Linux, so that's why the question is posted here.

For the upcoming next big feature, I have to understand why people use MakeMKV without GUI in a first place, as console makemkvcon is rather limited. Please do describe the scenario that forces you to do so. Examples are:

- I hate GUI, no matter the functionality, I would use console
- I use packaged (by someone) MakeMKV, and they don't provide GUI
- I have a full Linux system, but compiling the GUI is too hard
- I have a limited Linux system, where installing GUI is not an option (please provide details)
- I run MakeMKV on a remote box (please provide details)

Or, write your own reason. A brief description of your usage scenario would be helpful. Any feedback would be welcome. Thanks!

[suit1]

Hello.
I have a home server with Ubuntu (with no GUI), which runs torrents, plex, etc.
So I use makemkv on this server to convert Blue-Ray discs to mkv, because I do not want to download ~50 Gb to my laptop and upload back to server an .mkv file each time

Thank you for makemkvcon.

[D3VRO]

Hi mike, thanks for the consideration of your userbase.

I personally use MakeMKV on an headless server so I can not use a GUI at all. Anyway, I always prefer commandline tools (eac3to, bdinfo-cli, mkvmerge etc) over their GUI alternatives, because it should be a pretty straight forward task, it allows me to automate/script it, and I don't want to lose any time understanding a GUI, finding where are the options.

[robf2112]

Hey, Mike -- love makemkv.

The box I rip on doesn't even have a keyboard/monitor connected to it normally. I run makemkvcon after connecting to the ripper via ssh, in a screen or tmux session that I can disconnect from while rips are ongoing.

I have a request, actually, and while I don't want to assume anything about how simple or complicated my request is, I don't think it's a huge thing. I'd love your feedback.

Often when ripping TV series, a disc will have a title for each episode, AND a title that it all episodes together. This is an excellent example of a use case that would benefit from what I'm about to request.

Currently, the command-line syntax I use is something like this:
makemkvcon mkv dev:$DEVICE $TITLE /output_dir

For $TITLE, a single number is allowed, or the word "all". I'd really like to be able to pass something like "1-5,8". What I need to do now is either pass "all" and rip a bunch of material I don't want or need, or run the command multiple times -- once for each title I want. Running multiple times is what really becomes inconvenient, especially when the disc has certain types of copy protection schemes ("Complex multiplex encountered").

What do you think? Is it a big ask for makemkvcon to be able to parse a title list and rip multiple titles without completely rescanning the structure every time?

Thanks for your time and your wonderful tool!

Rob

[YortheHunter]

Hey Mike,
Let me get my thanks and appreciation out of the way first. Love the software and as of ~1mo ago am a proud owner/sponser of the work. That said, I personally use linux with no GUI as I also rip on a headless system and have a huge collection of movies I am working to digitize. It seems to be much easier to automate pieces of the operation with makemkvcon v/s GUI. I have found my 'magic' formula for both makemkv and handbrake so I can simply insert disc and run my scripted operations while I work with very little interruption. The GUI requires more intervention and time, which ends up being a more significant mental break.

My only requests at this time would be for a 'dry run' or 'scan' parameter and then the ability to output the operational data to a file v/s having it sent to stdout. So far my attempts at trying to capture this output have ended up in either unreadable files or empty files which captured nothing. Its not a big deal, but being able to log the data sent to stdout would allow additonal scripting functionality.


Hope this gives you some good user base intel for the cli user base. Happy to answer any additional questions if needed. Thanks for the great software and keep up the good work.

[pipo233]

Hi Mike

I use the console version on my htpc to decrypt blu-rays so that they are playable with kodi/Librelec

I don't use any other functions.

The only thing that is important to me are the AACS updates to support new disks

[wmcclain]

I don't use console makemkv now, but can imagine how it might be useful under the "I run MakeMKV on a remote box" category.

I am saving decrypted full disc backups as iso files on my server. These are "safety backups" of my Blu-ray collection.

I may want to extract mkv files in the future and a command line tool would spare me from copying the iso to my desktop.

[beandog]

I use it to do backups of my discs:

makemkvcon --noscan --minlength=0 -r backup --decrypt disc:0

and as an awesome fallback for when I don't have a KEYDB.cfg entry.

[drxenos]

I've written my own scripting language, specifically tailored to transcoding discs into mkv files. My automation goals seem different than most. Most people seem interested in quickly and easily extracting or transcoding Blu-rays or DVDs into media files. I'm more interested in repeatability. I realized long ago that there is a lot of research that goes into processing discs (determining title numbers, tracks, forced subtitles, etc.). I wanted to preserve this knowledge, so reprocessing discs in the future (e.g., errors, newer formats, change-of-mind, etc.) would be easy.

For me, reprocessing a disc is simply a matter of rerunning the script. It runs a variety of tools, including MakeMkv (MM), to achieve its target results. I use MM for the following reasons (again, this is all automated by my scripting tool):

1. HandBrake (HB) can't "see" or has issues processing a disc or a title on the disc. In this case, I extract the title(s) with MM, first, and then run it through HB.

2. The disc authors put the audio commentary track in a separate title (identical video). In this case, I extract the titles with MM, merge them with mkvmerge, and transcode with HB.

3. The deleted scenes (or other) are all in separate titles (even when there is a "play all" option). I extract all the titles with MM, concatenate them with mkvmerge, and transcode with HB.

4. Some DVD titles contain multiple videos. These secondary videos, though playable in the DVD menu, are not accessible with HB. MM is able to extract them, though.

5. other issues I can think of...

My main wishes for MakeMKV are:
1. Be able to extract a given set of titles (instead of 1 or all) without having to run MM over and over (which can be time consuming).

2. Tell MM NOT to ignore duplicate titles. Some times the above operations can be made more difficult because MM chooses to use a different title in a set of duplicates than I used in HB and my script. What I currently do is my tool creates a mapping of all duplicates and when the title I use is not found, the tool will remap it to the one that MM uses. This is NOT ideal because even though MM thinks they are duplicates (I assume because they use the same m2ts files), they often have different audio.

3. Tell MM to use the MPLS title and not the M2TS one. It seems when MM sees an MPLS that only has one M2TS, it uses the later when creating its set of titles. I would be more convenient if it would also use the MPLS (i.e., in its "robot" output which my tool parses). Currently, my tool uses BDTools to glean the m2ts files an mpls uses, and if the mpls is not seen and it only has one m2ts, remap it to the m2ts.

3. Be able to specify a title to extract by mpls (goes with 2 and 3). Having to specify an MM specific title number is not convenience. If I could just give it the mpls and angle (and video # in cases where a DVD title contains multiple videos), it would be much easier (I think my 2 & 3 would go away).

4. Be able to dump the output in JSON. This would make it SO much easier to parse the output. The robot output is much easier than the non-robot, but parsing JSON would be trivial.

Sorry for such a long post (but you did ask ),
DrX

[johna]

I only use the GUI to set the registration code. Otherwise, typical use case is having MakeMKV execute when user clicks on universal remote control button. This automates the ripping and makes content it available to Kodi.

Currently the script assumes the largest file ripped is the main content but there are times where that it is not the case. It would be good if MakeMKV can determine what the main content is so I can make that available via Kodi instead. I see that most recent disk I ripped MakeMKV does indicate what the main feature is. Maybe it does that all the time now....not sure.

[d-k-bo]

Hi,

first of all - thank you for the great tool you created!

Well, I never really used the MakeMKV GUI - only a few times for testing purposes. I'm mainly interested in the console version since I'm writing a little script to automatically rip DVDs to my HTPC, gather metadata from TMDb etc.

For my needs it would be great if you could:

1. Use the title number that is also used by other great tools like lsdvd, vlc and mplayer.

2. Select multiple titles (as drxenos & rob2112 have already written)

3. Select video angles, audio & subtitle streams you want to rip (like in the GUI)

It would be amazing if you could implement those features in makemkvcon!

[cpare]

I have automated the process so all I have to do is drop a disk in and close the tray, when complete i get three audible beeps and the tray opens!

[AffSeda]

Like many others, I use it in scripts. I have a script that detects what type of medium is in the drive (cd, dvd, bd, uhd) and then proceeds accordingly by calling the appropriate tool, which is makemkvcon for bd/uhd.

[chase_c]

The GUI is vital in our house. My wife also enjoys ripping and encoding media and she requires a GUI.

We are running both Windows and Ubuntu throughout our physical media to Plex pipeline.

[tomty89]

So far I've only used GUI, probably because I don't have an x86(-64) headless box. It would be great if I can at least make a full (decrypted) backup with only CLI though. Picking streams and all that with CLI is rather annoying to me (well, maybe until I get used to it), so personally I don't find it crucial.

I make MKV files out of DVDs way more often than BDs though, as M2TS works fine on my player most of the time (but not so well for MKV). Perhaps that's why I don't find a full-feature CLI necessary anyway.

Thank you for your great work. Would be great if there can be aarch64 (and maybe armv7) build btw.