ripping blu-rays with multiple versions of a movie

[dancrocker]

I feel almost ashamed to post this, but I've searched and searched but have been unable to find a comprehensive answer. This has to have been answered already so I'm sure I missed it. It's quite frustrating that the search function on forums like this isn't smarter (or perhaps I'm not very good at using it).
Please point me to an explanation that I may have missed.
I'm a techie but a major noob when it comes to ripping blu-rays, so please be gentle .

I have "Avatar (Extended Collector's Edition)" 3-disc blu-ray that I bought in late 2010. As many of you know, disc 1 includes 3 cuts of the first movie. I also see three large title files on the disc. I am aware that sometimes, with multiple cuts, scenes are spread across multiple files and shared between versions. I also see a "segment map" which I think is related to this.

Is there a generally applicable procedure to rip a specific version? I'm sure Avatar will not be the only one I will encounter like this. In this particular case, I'm interested in the extended collector's version. However the runtime of the longest track is a little less than 3 hours while, from what I read, this version should have a runtime of about 3 hours 15 mins.

I'd appreciate some guidance.

[dcoke22]

According to DVDCompare.net (https://dvdcompare.net/comparisons/film.php?fid=16110) the three versions of Avatar are as follows:

Theatrical Cut (161:24)
Special Edition (170:34)
Collector's Extended Edition (178:09)

The Wikipedia page for Avatar also suggests the 3 versions are those lengths.


Avatar: The Way of Water is about 192 minutes, however. Perhaps that's the one you're thinking of?

[dancrocker]

Thanks. I found the runtime reference in another post (either here or on reddit). Perhaps it was wrong.
Even so and based on the other posts I've seen, it seems like ripping something like the collector's cut would be more than just ripping the longest track. I've seen references to "playlists" that I don't understand. It sounded like different tracks could have scenes that were part of a single cut and the player would grab scenes in the right order from these separate tracks.
But maybe I'm misunderstanding.
Am I?

[dcoke22]

Blu-rays and 4K UHDs have a file structure such that there are .mpls files, which can be thought of as playlists of video files, and .m2ts files, which are actual video files. (If you make a decrypted backup of a blu-ray with MakeMKV [click they icon of a yellow folder with the green arrow on the first screen] you can find the .m2ts files in the <backup>/BDMV/STREAM folder and play them with VLC.)

The .mpls files are playlists of .m2ts files. A movie might be made up of 1, two, or many .m2ts files. A blu-ray player has the capability to switch between one .m2ts file and the next one seamlessly. This is called seamless branching. This functionality is handy for including multiple versions of a movie on a single disc. The three versions of Avatar are mostly the same. The parts that are different are undoubtedly chopped up into separate .m2ts files. There is most likely a .mpls file for each version of the film, with the various segments listed in order. Some of the segments are undoubtedly the same for all three versions. If you highlight one of these titles on the left side in MakeMKV, on the right side of the window you'll see a reference to the name of the .mpls that defines it and the 'segment map' will show you the name of and the order of the segments. (Segments are always named as a zero padded 5-digit number, e.g. 00431.m2ts.)

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but is a good enough way to think about to understand what's going on.

[dancrocker]

Ok, this makes sense.
So then, how do I create a single file of a specific cut of the movie that I can play with Plex? Or can I?

Also, the three huge files I see when looking at the disc using makemkv are all mpls files (numbered 0001, 0002, and 0003). Clearly they correspond to the three versions of the movie. But if they're playlists, why are they so big? They're all 30GB+. In order to be this big they have to contain actual video, I would think.

Edit: Could it be that the size shown for the mpls file is just the aggregate size of all of the segments? Does makemkv use the mpls file to gather up the segments in order to make one file?

Edit2: I did a backup of the disc (decrypted) and can see that all the mpls files are very small.

I'll understand everything if someone just tells me that all I need to do is to select the correct mpls file with makemkv and it will do all of the video file combining "under the hood".