help a confused newbie

[aspi0]

Hello. I am giving MakeMKV a try on Windows and I am confused about what it does and what its intended purpose is. I see this on the main page -

"MKV files are easy to change. Want to remove unneeded audio track from the file? Thought about converting MPEG-2 video into H264 to make the file 5 times smaller? All of it can be easily done with free software.
MKV files are compact. For exactly the same content MKV files are about 10% smaller than DVD files and roughly 40% smaller than Blu-ray files."

When I open the program I see no options to do any of this. I took a 3.9GB DVD, unchecked some foreign audio I don't care about, and I got a 3.7GB .MKV file. All this appears to do is mux the audio video and subtitles into an MKV the same size with no transcoding or compression. What are these claims about converting to H264 and files 10% smaller than DVD?

Thoroughly confused...

[Romansh]

The page you're quoting is about the MKV file format, not MakeMKV.

MakeMKV creates MKV files from your DVD and Blu-ray discs, leaving the video, audio and subtitle streams untouched. The rest (re-encoding, etc.) is can be accomplished with third-party software.

[aspi0]

OK, so for my purposes, I'm not looking to archive my stuff, and if I was I would do it as ISO's. I have been ripping with DVDShrink uncompressed and then transcoding those files to H264 MKV with Handbrake. (mostly TV series) Is there any advantages to using MakeMKV over DVDShrink for the ripping piece? Faster? More accurate? I am coming from the audio realm where one can use Exact Audio copy with Accurate Rip plugin to rip and encode a CD to compressed lossless FLAC in one shot. I'm surprised there does not seem to be an analagous one-step video solution.

[Romansh]

MakeMKV may be able to rip recent discs with new protections that DVDShrink (which hasn't been updated in years) won't.

[aspi0]

good point i will keep that in mind