www.makemkv.com

I'm ripping the original Dragon Ball DVDs and the output files have multiple episodes in them. IE from disk 1, six .mkv files were created. Each .mkv file has six episodes. I know this because VLC player will tell me what episode and what part of the episode is playing if I hover over the play bar.

In the past, ripping DVDs has always resulted in a single .mkv per file, both for DVDs and Blu-rays. I use HandBrake to convert the files to .mp4, but in doing this I'm creating a single .mp4 file that has six episodes in it.

Is it possible to tell MakeMKV to separate out the episodes into separate files? Or is that just how the software works when ripping certain disks?

Possible, using manual settings. Easy, no.

You will probably discover "DVD on BD" soon, where they put DVD series on to BDs, and you end up with as many as 56 episodes on one file (max I've seen so far).

In these cases, it's easiest to just rip the whole thing, then break it up with handbrake. The fact that you can run handbrake's Command Line Interface with a batch file is great for this.

That is how the disk was authored. There is something in the menu's code that picks out the correct chapter range when selecting an episode in the DVD player.

Why it is done that way sometimes and others not: I don't know. Something in the work flow or choices the operator made.

Handbrake will pick out chapter ranges to create individual episodes from a combined file, but you have to manually find and specify the chapter numbers first. Or you can split them out with mkvmerge first.

Thanks for the advice. I'll try manually marking out the episodes using HandBrake and see how I go.