Question to all: MakeMKV without GUI, console only

[ramicio]

I never even knew there was a console version. I, too, like so many, run a headless server. But I just use X11 forwarding and the GUI pops up on my PC.

[timeshifter]

Just curious, did anything come of this question? Thread started in Oct 2020, it's now almost May 2022. A decent number of posts from people with lots of interesting insights, use cases and useful information. As many have done, I have come up with my own workflow and code to work around the quirks of MakeMKV and makemkvcon to save time.

It's been a rather one-sided conversation though. I was hoping for something more like a dialog that might involve the users of this wonderful tool to help guide it along a path to becoming even better.

Would welcome any response from the development team.

[gary9872]

I run an automated script trigger by a UDEV event. As soon as a Disc is inserted it rips the main title and encodes it. Using the GUI just wastes time for this operation.

[timeshifter]

Just curious, did anything come of this question? Thread started in Oct 2020, it's now almost May 2022. A decent number of posts from people with lots of interesting insights, use cases and useful information. As many have done, I have come up with my own workflow and code to work around the quirks of MakeMKV and makemkvcon to save time.

It's been a rather one-sided conversation though. I was hoping for something more like a dialog that might involve the users of this wonderful tool to help guide it along a path to becoming even better.

Would welcome any response from the development team.

Bump.

[taylor85345]

Like many other users here, I use my headless media server to rip Blu-Rays, as it is the only device I have left that can accept my SATA drive. I've tried using X11 forwarding to my laptop with intermittent success, but I am typically limited to command-line only. Generally makemkvcon is very suitable for my needs, but in cases of discs that go out of their way to obfuscate the actual movie title it would be very helpful to have more verbose output for `makemkvcon info`, particularly file sizes and descriptive titles like in the GUI. A built-in option for ripping multiple titles in a single run would also be helpful.

[4wheels]

As a new user, I haven't had much time to explore the features of MakeMKV yet (and now dealing with the breakage caused by glibc 2.36), but I see myself using both the GUI and console depending on the scenario. I would hate to see the GUI disappear without a really stellar reason!

[mikev]

Hi, Mike. I'm a long time user and first time poster. I created this account just to reply to this thread. Thanks for your hard work.

A command-line interface would allow more scripting opportunities and that (or an API) would hook quite well into encoders out there. A lot of us are quite interested in a more streamlined rip+encode experience, where the only thing we need to do is insert a disc and run a command.

While I have a working solution to forward the GUI from my headless server to a laptop, I would vastly prefer a CLI with as much capability as the GUI. This would make it far easier to determine what I did for one disc and reproduce it for another. There are also some configuration items I haven't figured out how to tweak just right, like which audio tracks to collect (example: I never want to rip the nested 5.1 track under the 7.1 version of the same track, so on bigger discs, I must expand every title and check its audio contents. This would be much easier with sed or python).

Incorporating all GUI features into the CLI is one of two things I'm waiting on to justify purchasing a license. (The other is a hook for Kodi so it can play copy-protected blu ray discs within its own user interface, no MakeMKV GUI or CLI necessary. Implement either to win my money.)

I'd also be willing to consider a larger figure, perhaps as part of a collective bounty, for opening the code license to GPL (or AGPL, which would afford you more protections), with commercial licenses available to people who would pay for fewer restrictions. Opening just Linux is fine by me, though I fully expect you to say either there are other licensing requirements that prohibit this or else you're unwilling to give up your Windows licensing revenue since Qt makes it too portable. (Unless there's lots of Windows-specific code that you could withhold from this open version?) Getting this packaged in Debian and Fedora (and hopefully downstream distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, Alma, and EPEL) would radically increase adoption and visibility.

[krutoileshii]

For me the primary benefit is really scripting to ffmpeg for trans-coding.

[Kreeblah]

I'm more interested in repeatability. I realized long ago that there is a lot of research that goes into processing discs (determining title numbers, tracks, forced subtitles, etc.). I wanted to preserve this knowledge, so reprocessing discs in the future (e.g., errors, newer formats, change-of-mind, etc.) would be easy.

Mac user here. This is my use case for makemkvcon. I started writing an application to rip known Blu-ray soundtracks to FLAC files and clean up the intermediary files. It just needs to be pointed at a JSON file with info about a disc (identified by calculating the SHA1 sum of the title key, like keydb.cfg has) and uses makemkvcon to grab the data off of the disc, the FFMPEG tools to extract specific chapters for the tracks (merging multiple chapters together if a track spans more than one chapter) and convert them to FLAC, and the FLAC CLI tools to tag and recompress them.

Two things that would make the process easier would be a simpler way to get the mount point of a mounted disc from its makemkvcon device number (right now, I'm using a horrible hack that involves taking the output from makemkvcon and parsing out the output from mount to match it up with a mount point; it works, but it feels potentially really fragile) for checking the title key and extracting things like cover art (when it's present on the disc) and the ability to specify a specific list of titles/chapter numbers to output as a single file, so that I don't have to use FFMPEG to stitch things together that span multiple chapters.

[carvers]

Doing some necromancy here, but it's something I use a lot.

I use makemkvcon exclusively. I use it on a headless linux server on my home network.

I have custom software written around mapping disks to specific titles and, when necessary, chapters, and then extracting those titles and chapters, naming them correctly, and moving them to the right locations.

I have basically 0 interest in using a GUI for this; it's repetitive, error prone, can't be automated easily, and doesn't fit my use case basically at all. I like being able to do the work of mapping a disc once, then being able to just insert it and have the software take care of the rest.