A Mountain Of Problems Using MakeMKV on my Vista laptop

[md1985]

Ever since I got my new WDTV device a month ago, I have been looking for a way to rip my vast dvd collection to one video file without losing any video or audio quality. I tried the obvious method of ripping the movie to one large vob file, but on most movies doing this seems to royally screw up the timecode thus making it impossible to fast forward, rewind, or seek correctly. I came across MakeMKV yesterday and I thought my prayers had been answered. It seemed like this program did everything I could want, it ripped the whole DVD title to one Matroska file with the same quality and even slightly smaller file size. Then I actually tried using it, and I've been going out of my mind all night and day trying to get it to work right. Here goes...

First off, I installed the program and launched it. It replied with a message saying that no usable optical drives could be found and that the program needed admin privledges. I have long since disabled UAC, so I ran it as an administrator. Nothing changed. I then thought, hmmm, why not try to just open the video_ts folder directly? So I did. It said that it would probably fail do to it being on an unusable optical drive. It didn't. However, it kept giving me this error: Calculated BUP offset does not match one in IFO header. It then said that the main title gave it some kind of internal mux error and failed to open that title, making it useless to me. I tried installing DVD43 and running it in the background and opening the folder on the disc. It now gives me DIFFERENT errors and refuses to work. I even tried the big daddy, AnyDVD and this time it worked. However I then ported the resulting mkv to my external drive and played it on the WDTV. Everything seems to work okay, until I attempt to rewind. It responded by fast forwarding, pressing the fast forward button just made it go faster. I attempted to select a chapter, and it just plopped me back into the movie at some random point a minute or so later.

I then tried watching the original file on my PC and it causes Media Player Classic to choke if I try to seek or chapter skip. I then tried this with several different DVDs in my collection of varying ages and copy protections. Some examples are: The X-Files: Fight The Future (the first DVD I tried to rip as detailed above), Freddy Vs. Jason, The Exorcist, The Fly, Jason X and NONE OF THEM WORKED correctly no matter what I did. Either they wouldn't open at all, or the ouptut file wouldn't play correctly. I have no clue what the problem is. I know it's not my DVD drive (the laptop and drive are only 6 months old in fact) as it works fine with various other DVD programs (DVD Decrypter, DVD Shrink, DVD2One, CloneDVD, etc.).

The only silver lining I recently found is that if I rip the DVD to the hard drive with a different program (such as shrink in re-author mode) MakeMKV seems to work. This also presents a problem for me, as my laptop DVD drive seems to have riplock and never rips faster than 3x. This then means I have to do two full processes (the ripping and the mkving) which takes like an hour to do in total per DVD, while ripping from the disc drive (bad output and all) only takes half that time. As you can tell, I'm about at my wits end trying to figure something out here. Thus the long diatribe. Sorry I ranted so long and thanks in advance to whoever reads it and can help me out in someway.

[LVinWC]

Were you looking for movie files only, or were you looking for complete DVD content with menus?

If it is the latter, I have some suggestions for you.

If it is the former, I'm in the same boat. I just posted the error log for my optical device not found error message.

[mike admin]

MakeMKV really needs access to the drive. The "missing drive" is a known problem that happens only on Vista with AHCI SATA controller and some buggy drives. Please try to apply Microsoft patch mentioned in this http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=187 thread and see if it helps. If it doesn't your only option for now is to switch AHCI mode off in bios.

[minou]

Frankly, I would suggest that you just make ISO files. WDTV recognises and plays ISO files without any problem (it shows them as single files - just as it shows MKV files). Use AnyDVD to rip the DVD and either use AnyDVD to rip directly to an ISO or IMGBURN (simply drag & drop to the IMGBURN icon). If you subsequently need to burn a DVD disk from the ISO, use IMGBURN again. Simplicity itself.