MKV - Auto Batch Chapter Renaming

[jfred305]

I have a drive full of .mkv movies; all with default chapter names (i.e. Chapter01, Chapter02 etc.). MkvMerge has a chapter editor that is able to change chapter names without remuxing the .mkv. So, I can look up the names of the chapters and rename them appropriately.

There are online databases out there that have chapter titles for numerous movies. It must be possible to create a program that uses MkvMerge or MakeMKV in conjunction with online databases to automatically rename the chapters of all of the movies on my drive.

It would be quite a headache to have to manually rename the chapter titles for all of the movies in my collection.

It’s too bad MakeMKV doesn’t have this feature built in, so that the chapters have the correct names to start with.

Any Ideas, suggestions or comments?

[mike admin]

For the record, what online database are you referring to?

[jfred305]

Tag Chimp is one.

http://www.tagchimp.com/

[robpdotcom]

There's a program called ChapterGrabber that will read the chapters from a disc, and create a chapter file with the names. To use it on something you have already ripped, you need to scan the disc (it just takes a few seconds) and use MKVMerge to add the chapters to the mkv.

[jfred305]

Thanks for the info, I will look into Chapter Grabber. It seems like a good tool but I have so many DVDs already ripped to mkv that it would still be too much work to rip the chapters one by one. Programs like XBMC will search a drive or folder, read the movie file names and automatically download each movie's metadata. If there was only a way to do this for chapters and then batch process them with MKVMerge.

If Chapter Grabber can pull up chapter names then there must be a way for MakeMKV to do this. This way chapter names could be added when the MKV file is created.

[trondmm]

I have a drive full of .mkv movies; all with default chapter names (i.e. Chapter01, Chapter02 etc.). MkvMerge has a chapter editor that is able to change chapter names without remuxing the .mkv. So, I can look up the names of the chapters and rename them appropriately.

There are online databases out there that have chapter titles for numerous movies. It must be possible to create a program that uses MkvMerge or MakeMKV in conjunction with online databases to automatically rename the chapters of all of the movies on my drive.

It would be quite a headache to have to manually rename the chapter titles for all of the movies in my collection.

It’s too bad MakeMKV doesn’t have this feature built in, so that the chapters have the correct names to start with.

Any Ideas, suggestions or comments?

Actually, it shouldn't be that hard to fix chapternames automatically, as longs as you have the list of names.

You can use the command line version of mkvextract to get the list of chapters

mkvextract chapters -s movie.mkv

Will output something like this:

CHAPTER01=00:00:00.000
CHAPTER01NAME=Chapter 00
CHAPTER02=00:08:49.278
CHAPTER02NAME=Chapter 01
CHAPTER03=00:14:52.641
CHAPTER03NAME=Chapter 02
...

If you have a list of proper chapternames, it shouldn't take too many lines of perl to replace the generic chapter names with the proper names. You can then use mkvmerge with the result to add the chapters back into the mkv-file.

All of this should be fairly simple to script, assuming you already have the list of chapternames you want to use.