I recently have been trying to rip some DVDs for probably the first time in over a decade, so please forgive my ignorance. These are old DVDs of local events, not studio releases or something.
Several of them have ripped just fine, but a few of them seem to stall at some point and start throwing errors. I've tried cleaning the discs with a moist microfiber. They generally appear in good condition to the eye. Despite being probably 10-15 years old, they've probably only been taken out of their case a small handful of times.
I've attached two debug logs: the first was something I've noticed a few times where after trying and failing to rip the DVD, it will then throw an error when I try to reopen it. That's probably less helpful—the second attachment is the full debug log from just trying to rip one of the discs. I've tried increasing the read retry count and have tried two different drives.
Would greatly appreciate any help.
Read Errors
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stature107
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Sat Jun 06, 2026 6:16 pm
Read Errors
- Attachments
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- MakeMKV_log_2_redacted.txt
- (32.23 KiB) Downloaded 7 times
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- MakeMKV_log_1_redacted.txt
- (2.2 KiB) Downloaded 7 times
Re: Read Errors
What happens if you try to make a decrypted backup of the disc? On the first screen of MakeMKV click the icon of the green arrow and the yellow folder and make sure the decrypt checkbox is checked.
Doing a backup of a disc will read the entire disc and in the case of a DVD output the contents to an .iso file. You can then open that .iso file with MakeMKV and attempt to create .mkv files from it.
You can think of MakeMKV as trying to do two things. One is read a disc and the other is interpret the contents to be able to discern individual titles on a disc. By doing the backup step, MakeMKV is only trying to read the disc and not trying to interpret the contents. That'll happen when you open the resulting .iso file in MakeMKV.
Doing a backup of a disc will read the entire disc and in the case of a DVD output the contents to an .iso file. You can then open that .iso file with MakeMKV and attempt to create .mkv files from it.
You can think of MakeMKV as trying to do two things. One is read a disc and the other is interpret the contents to be able to discern individual titles on a disc. By doing the backup step, MakeMKV is only trying to read the disc and not trying to interpret the contents. That'll happen when you open the resulting .iso file in MakeMKV.
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stature107
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Sat Jun 06, 2026 6:16 pm
Re: Read Errors
Thanks for your help! Just tried this. Like before, it ran normally for a while before slowing down to a crawl without any errors for some time. Now this is what it looks like after "crawling" for about an hour or so.
- makemkv.png (279.38 KiB) Viewed 30 times
Re: Read Errors
If by "old DVD of local events" you really mean some DVD+/-R, it's probably not very surprising that disc rot has occured to it. In that case you might want to use ddrescue or alike to salvage what can possibly be from the disc.