www.makemkv.com

I posted about this earlier, probably in the wrong place. Now I've got a bit more information, so here goes:

MakeMKV: 1.12.2 for Windows.

DVD: King Crimson's "Beat" KCSP9. It's a DVD-A, but the content I'm trying to extract is in VIDEO_TS. The disc, according to both MakeMKV and DVD Decrypter, has no encryption or protection whatsoever: My goal is to extract the DTS stream, wrap it in FLAC and play it on a Logitech Squeezebox, something I've done many times with other discs with no issues.

The problem: When I open the disc in MakeMKV and look at the title I care about, the chapters look perfect: However the MKV that gets created doesn't play in VLC. It opens, just sits there for a while, then suddenly scans to the end without ever actually playing. The timeline in VLC reports a reasonable time, it just doesn't play.

If I open the MKV in AudioMuxer in order to demux the audio content and split into individual song files, the chapters that initially looked good in MakeMKV become: AudioMuxer winds up creating nine output files, the first eight of which are very small and silent, while the final one contains all the audio. Although VLC will not play the MKV at all, the audio as extracted by AudioMuxer from that same MKV file is good.

If I bypass MakeMKV and open the disc directly in AudioMuxer (remember, the disc is not encrypted), I get the expected results. The chapters are reasonable: And the output files are exactly what I'd expect, one file per song, properly split.

I can't figure out why MakeMKV sees the proper chapters when it opens the disc, but they don't carry over properly when creating the MKV. Or at the very least, VLC and AudioMuxer do not see them correctly.

I've seen this behavior with other discs, and while the problem discs aren't all DVD-A (that is, many do not have anything in AUDIO_TS), I think they may all be discs where the content is largely musical and the "video" is really just still images or slideshows. It's possible that I only think that's relevant because most of why I try to do involves that type of disc.

The issue is still there in the latest version. I use the following steps:

- Extract all titles with MakeMKV
- Edit chapter times with MKVToolNix (will not split correctly after editing)
- Split using ffmpeg (adjust "map 0:" to get desired track)

Tried with King Crimson.

I now discovered the root cause:

The video track is much shorter than the audio tracks. This causes MakeMkv to get chapters wrong. So it is easier to just copy the audio tracks - the resulting file splits up fine.

Chapters are copied automatically, example is for audio in tracks 1 and 2.

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c copy -map 0:1 -map 0:2 output.mkv

This is still a problem. Trying to rip RF's Washington Square Church. End up with 10 empty chapters and the 11th with all the audio. Interestingly, I tried DVD Audio Extractor software and it immediately recognized each chapter and audio with correct length and extracted to FLAC without issue.

I would think this kind of thing would be a walk in the park for MakeMKV but it does not work?

Any chance this could be addressed?

How are you getting at the correct chapters? I"m new to the forums and looking at this issue for my King Crimson discs. If I can extract the correct chapter info, I can, as has been suggested, use MKV Tools to put them back correctly. I also wrote a small app that extracts all tracks and audio streams from the MKV so I get the resulting surround and stereo FLACs on my NAS. That works without interaction and just extracts everything but without chapters... it's useless!

Thanks for any insight.