Preview, please!

[Guitrdone]

MakeMKV is such a great tool. But the information available for titles is not enough for alot of discs.

Wouldn't it be great if MakeMKV could let you preview? Maybe titles to VLC?

Oh please? Please please?

[Woodstock]

You can use MakeMKV as a source for VLC... it's even in the configuration.

The question is, how valuable would it be? When ripping is your target, "rip everything and check it later" is an option. And if you're talking things like obfuscated Lionsgate titles, there is still the fact that internal parts can be duplicated and/or out-of-order.

[dcoke22]

I make a decrypted backup of a blu-ray first. I create .mkv files from that backup. By having the backup, I can 'preview' the raw .m2ts files in the backup to verify what a title is before I create the .mkv for it. Creating .mkvs from a backup means .mkv creation goes as fast as my storage will go. In my case, that's a lot faster than reading from the optical disc.

[Guitrdone]

Thanks you guys for chiming in!

My comments were largely about TV series discs. But the same applies to movies and specialty discs.

I do believe that the MakeMKV team can add value by making this easier for us.

Thanks again!

[Dunebasher]

It's weird, but whenever anyone suggests being able to preview titles using VLC, the replies never seem to understand why anybody would want to do that and they basically boil down to "why don't you just rip everything and delete what you don't want?"

Because it's so time-consuming, that's why

I genuinely can't grasp why there seems to be so much resistance to giving MakeMKV the ability to preview a title via VLC so you can forensically select the exact correct title(s) you want to rip and you don't waste your time ripping an entire disc when you might only want a single title.

Not everybody is ripping films, some of us have reasons for only wanting to be able to identify and rip specific individual titles rather than have to wait for an entire Blu-ray to be ripped just so we can then delete most of the titles.

[jinx100]

Since you cannot view any .m2ts file until it is decrypted, you must decrypt them all. Then you can view and select the one you want. The slow part is just reading the data from the optical drive.

How would any preview function in MakeMKV help? Once the disc is backed-up to your hard drive, you can view the individual .m2ts files with VLC and keep the one(s) you want and discard the rest.

Load your BR disc, under "File" choose "Backup" and tick decrypt when the box opens. The .m2ts files will be in the STREAM folder. Try it!

[Dunebasher]

Load your BR disc, under "File" choose "Backup" and tick decrypt when the box opens. The .m2ts files will be in the STREAM folder. Try it!

Unfortunately, I don't see how that helps me achieve what I want, because it's still forcing you to rip all the files from the disc first. That's precisely what I'm trying to avoid, since it's so painfully time-consuming when you only want (say) a single episode from a multi-episode disc.

OK, since it's apparently not possible for MakeMKV ever to support a preview functionality, can you suggest any BD player apps, preferably freeware, that will actually show you the .mt2s info of whatever you're watching, so you then know exactly which title to select in MakeMKV?

[Sunoo]

OK, since it's apparently not possible for MakeMKV ever to support a preview functionality, can you suggest any BD player apps, preferably freeware, that will actually show you the .mt2s info of whatever you're watching, so you then know exactly which title to select in MakeMKV?

I play the disc in VLC and also run Process Monitor to see which mpls and m2ts files are being opened as I do.

[thetoad]

while makemkv could include it, its not fully in scope of what makemkv is. a preview expands the scope, and while it might be useful, the author might not want to spend his time on it.

it's as simple as that.

[Lord_EDOX]

Just use VLC to use MakeMKV as a decryption engine to play encrypted disks. To get to this go to View > Preferences > Integrations Tab. Enjoy!