www.makemkv.com

I seem to have found a problematic DVD that makemkv won't rip properly.

I don't believe it's a damaged disc, appears to be in good condition, plays fine, and the .vobs can be copied off using another method of decryption.

But when makemkv detects the titles, and I rip them all, it seems to not find the main program content - just the extras, trailers, and bonuses.

Anything I can do or provide to help improve makemkv to be able to handle DVDs authored as this one has?

What is listed, when you open the DVD manually?

You should get a list of all titles MakeMKV could find.

http://www.makemkv.com/manualdvd/ <-- DVD Manual Mode documentation

How the heck am I supposed to make sense of that?

A variety of things are necessary to "fix" this problem:

Access to what MakeMKV found when scanning the disk, at least part of which is available from a debug log, which you can turn on in Preferences->General. This we do not have, so we do not know if there were errors in the scan.

Alternatively, someone with access to the disk itself, to scan it. As old as this title is, there should be people who have ripped it before, or had problems.

There is an FAQ link in my signature that details the information necessary to submit to the program's author to check. In the past, he has posted manual DVD information for disks that are problematic, and used the information to update MakeMKV. Let's start there.