How can I identify which Blu-ray titles I want to rip? VLC doesn't show m2ts or mpls info

[Dunebasher]

I have many Blu-rays from which I only want to rip certain specific titles. How can I identify which .mpls or .m2ts files correspond to the titles I want?

Obviously there's no way to preview a title in MakeMKV before you rip it. I thought that VLC might do the trick, but I can't find any way of getting it to show me the .m2ts or .mpls info for any given title.

Any suggestions? Up till now I've just been ripping the whole disc and then deleting the titles I don't need afterwards, but this is of course very time-consuming.

[Chetwood]

BDInfo?

[Dunebasher]

Doesn't seem to work.

The most recent version I can find is 1.2, and the BDMV file on any Blu-ray I try to open is greyed-out so I can't select it.

Is there anything more reliable for OSX?

[dcoke22]

When you say "ripping the whole disc" are you making a backup or are you making a MKV file for every title on the disc?

MakeMKV shows you the segment map for a selected title. The segment map corresponds to the .m2ts files on a blu-ray.

[Dunebasher]

I want to rip specific titles from discs which have a main feature and *many* supplementary features.

In every case I *don't* want the main feature, I just want particular supplementary features (but *not* all of them).

Because MakeMKV will not let you preview what any given title actually is (I note people have been asking for this for over 10 years!), and I cannot find any way of getting VLC to show me what the actual m2ts or mpls info is for the specific titles I want, my only option has been to rip everything to MKVs (apart from the main feature, which is obvious given its filesize) and then play them once they're ripped and delete the ones I don't want.

From my current viewpoint, MakeMKV's segment map is only useful as a means of identifying the main feature. It's useless for identifying which supplemental titles I want, as I don't have any way of deducing what their m2ts or mpls numbers are.

Obviously, if I could just click on an item in the segment map and it would launch in VLC, that would solve the problem, but clearly there's no likelihood of video preview being offered any time soon.

So that's what I want. A means of identifying the m2ts or mpls info I need before I even open MakeMKV, so that I can then only rip the specific titles I need.

I was hoping it would be BDinfo, but the OSX version doesn't appear to work, possibly on account of not having been updated since 2011.

[dcoke22]

I understand better what you are trying to do, but I'm still unsure if you've made a backup or just .mkv files.

If you use MakeMKV to make a decrypted backup of a blu-ray… (http://makemkv.com/faq/item/4) you'll end up with a folder that has all the .m2ts files in it. It'll be something like <disc title>/BDMV/STREAM/*.m2ts

Those decrypted .m2ts files will play in VLC (https://www.videolan.org/vlc/) or MPV (https://mpv.io). You can then use the segment map to correlate and find the titles you're interested in.

Additionally, MakeMKV can open this backup instead of the disc and make .mkv files from the backup. This means you don't have to read from the optical disc a second time; making .mkv files can go as fast as your local storage can go.

[Dunebasher]

I want to make MKV rips of *just* the specific supplemental features I need.

I *don't* want to have to wait for an entire disc to be backed up when I only want a few titles from it. That precisely what I'm trying to avoid

I want to be able to identify the exact titles I need and *only* rip those from the disc, nothing more. The problem is, I can't find any way of doing that, apart from ripping the entire disc and then playing the ripped files to see what they are and deleting the ones I don't want.

So unless I've misunderstood how a decrypted backup works, that approach doesn't speed up the process for me, as I've still got to wait while all 40GB+ gets ripped from the disc, including all the stuff I don't want as well as the stuff I do.

Does that make sense?

[dcoke22]

I understand. I'm just suggesting to you how it works. How I think you want it to work seems unlikely to be implemented in MakeMKV. I'm not aware of any other tool that'll help you achieve your aim, although there certainly could be one.

If the time it takes to make a decrypted backup is too long… one thing MakeMKV can do is use more than one optical drive at a time. Get two or a half-dozen optical drives. MakeMKV will make rips from them at the same time.

If you find a way achieve the workflow you're looking for hopefully you'll post it on this forum. I'm curious.

[Dunebasher]

I genuinely don't understand why it's so difficult to do.

If VLC can use MakeMKV to provide decryption to play BDs, why can't MakeMKV use VLC as a player so that users can preview and identify which file(s) they want to rip?

[Woodstock]

Your original method is pretty much what I do; have MakeMKV rip everything longer than 30 seconds, and then review afterwards. It takes less of MY time than trying to figure it out beforehand, in part because VLC doesn't have to wait on the optical disk when skimming through titles.

The exception is with Lionsgate disks, which I presume is your primary difficulty right now... too many titles to randomly try to work through.

I use a two-prong approach: Avoid buying Lionsgate titles, and checking to see if anyone else has figured out what the correct playlist is (assuming MakeMKV can't guess; it is worked for the few I've bought so far).