www.makemkv.com

Makemkv has been working fine on Ubuntu with an external USB DVD drive. One disc out of a series of 9 DVDs goes into a "forever" mode. What seems to be something like an endless loop. When I finally quit it had been running for almost 2 hours with very little progress and an estimated time to complete of 74 hours. Thinking it might be a damaged DVD, I borrowed the same DVD in the series from a friend. Same thing. Every other DVD in the series is fine. DVDisaster does the same thing, goes into forever mode with no messages. Is there any way to get out of this endless loop or at least see what's going on?

And to add to the mystery, I played the first few minutes on VLC, it played fine. Jumped around to various spots and played from there, fine. Is there something about an Ubuntu library or something that is known to react this way in certain situations? Is there anything I can do about it? Should I just rip in VLC to an MP4 to have a backup?

patches23 wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 04, 2025 4:56 pm

And to add to the mystery, I played the first few minutes on VLC, it played fine. Jumped around to various spots and played from there, fine. Is there something about an Ubuntu library or something that is known to react this way in certain situations? Is there anything I can do about it? Should I just rip in VLC to an MP4 to have a backup?

Clean your laser lens.

You can try to make iso image with gddrescue.

sudo apt install gddrescue

Next you can run lsblk to find your drive. Normaly it is /dev/sr0

To make iso image from disc:

ddrescue /dev/sr0 dvd.iso dvd.log -b 2048 -n -v

If dvd is copy protect, then you need also libdvd-pkg and lsdvd packages to open protection.