Possibilities for multiple languages, and what parts of MakeMKV are open source

[organicguy]

Hi everyone,

As I continue digitizing my film collection, I find myself wishing for more capabilities from MakeMKV. I've been holding back on making any requests until I purchased a license, but now that I have done so I figured I'd put out a few questions/requests to see what is possible.

As I build my library I try to preserve both French and English content since I live in a multi-lingual household and we watch our movies in different languages. With languages in mind, on many physical movies, there may be two French audio and/or subtitle tracks -- one Canadian French, and one Parisian French. In MakeMKV, once I rip a disc, identifying which of those tracks is which in the mkv is a manual task, requiring listening to the audio, inspecting the subtitles using a separate tool, etc. I have a very large number of movies to go through, so easier identification of this information would be very useful. So, I find myself wondering if there isn't some additional metadata that could be included, in an audio track, a subtitle track, or a tag in the mkv file that would help identify which is which. Does anyone know if this metadata is even available on physical discs? Or are the audio/subtitle tracks completely indifferent from one another as far as programmatic inspection goes, aside from the language tag that isn't specific enough to distinguish between Canadian French and Parisian French?

Also related to languages, if a movie contains multiple editions, where each independent ripped edition takes up a decent amount of disc space but the combined space without redundancy consumes much less, I would like to be able to rip a movie into mkv format with multiple video tracks with less redundancy. As an example, many animated movies have localized video streams, with certain segments used because they contain text in the animation that is localized. These differences are minor, so when building a mkv file that supports more than one language it would be great if that was done without consuming as much disk space, with the video streams in the file pulling whichever segments are required.

Another issue I'd like to resolve is easier identification of duplication among the various video streams that are available on a disc in the MakeMKV UI. Whether it's multiple versions of the same video stream, one with chapters and one without, or multiple versions of a stream where all that differs is the languages that are available within that stream (eg. I find some movies have a English, French, Spanish, etc. in one video stream, and then another video stream with English and Japanese, but the chapters are the same, video is the same, so it's purely the additional alternative audio and subtitles that are available), or a stream that contains multiple segments that are also available as independent streams, there is duplication that could be detected. Going through the streams in MakeMKV to identify which ones contain duplicate segments is a pain, so I wonder what could be done to improve this? I read elsewhere on these forums that some parts of MakeMKV are open source, with the GUI being one such part, but I haven't found any open source pieces of MakeMKV since I read that. Are there open source portions of MakeMKV available?

That's it for now. Thanks in advance!

[dcoke22]

Also related to languages, if a movie contains multiple editions, where each independent ripped edition takes up a decent amount of disc space but the combined space without redundancy consumes much less, I would like to be able to rip a movie into mkv format with multiple video tracks with less redundancy. As an example, many animated movies have localized video streams, with certain segments used because they contain text in the animation that is localized. These differences are minor, so when building a mkv file that supports more than one language it would be great if that was done without consuming as much disk space, with the video streams in the file pulling whichever segments are required.

While I'm pretty sure the MKV container format supports this, I don't think any .mkv players support this. So, even if you could make one, I'm not sure you'd be able to play it.

[segfaulted]

I read elsewhere on these forums that some parts of MakeMKV are open source, with the GUI being one such part, but I haven't found any open source pieces of MakeMKV since I read that. Are there open source portions of MakeMKV available?

The source code for MakeMKV GUI and some dependencies are provided with the Linux release at viewtopic.php?f=3&t=224

Who knows if anyone's tried compiling it on Windows but it should be possible.