basic instructions not clear on how to copy

[ncmphoto]

Hello, I am a new forum member and new to Blu-Ray and MakeMKV.

I looked at the (brief) instructions on how to use Make MKV but first of all, the illustration must be of an older version because the one I downloaded yesterday has more icons in the toolbar.
In any case I loaded a Blu-Ray disc in my player, directly attached to the USB port on the Mac Mini, and it appeared on the desktop. I launched MakeMKV and it identified the optical drive, and saw the Blu-Ray disc, but I didn’t get the list of stuff on the disc as illustrated in the instructions, and there was nowhere to click, that I could see, to obtain that information, so as to be able to choose (via the little checkboxes) which info I wanted to copy to my hard drive. The illustrated icon in the instructions on the lower part of the main window with a DVD disc icon, the arrow, hd icon, and a button to click on saying Open DVD disk was not there.

So I chose Backup from the options, and that launched the process which took a while. At the end, there was a new folder called MAKEMKV in the directory I had previously chosen as the destination. But what should I click on in that folder to get it to play using VLC? I tried a number of things and nothing worked.

If the Backup doesn’t give a playable version of the disc, what should I have used and how do I go about it with the recent version of MakeMKV?

Sorry for the basic question, but as I have mentioned, I am new to this process.

thanks,
ncm

Mac Mini Server 2.3GHz Intel Core i7/16GbRAM/OSX 10.9.5
Samsung SE-506CB/RSWD portable Blu-ray writer

[ndjamena]

The GUI hasn't changed much since time began, and I doubt there's much difference between the Mac and windows versions.

So,
1: put a disc in, makemkv should detect it and some of the buttons should activate, generally you want to press the big image of a disc in the middle, that will bring up a list of available titles and from there you get to decide what you think you should rip.

Most people go into Preferences, select the "General" tab and click the "Expert Mode" checkbox, which will activate the "Advanced" tab as well as enabling some extra options in the main GUI.

Other than that, you might want to learn about profiles:

http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4385
http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8008

And the default selection rules:

http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4386

Plus there's the new Manual DVD mode that let's you split DVD titles by chapter (or cell) or join them as the case may be:

/manualdvd/

(For DVD only, it doesn't work for Blu Rays)

Then there's Backup, which you've discovered already, that creates a perfect copy of the disc on a harddrive (complete with menus and the file structure).

(For Blu Ray only, it doesn't work with DVDs)

There's probably more but that should get you started.

[ncmphoto]

Right. My problem is with your
item 1.put a disc in, makemkv should detect it and some of the buttons should activate, generally you want to press the big image of a disc in the middle, that will bring up a list of available titles and from there you get to decide what you think you should rip.

But that is what is missing: no icons below the Source description on the left side of the window. No DVD icon, no green arrow, no big image of a disc.

So I am back to asking, how can I obtain the list of available titles on the disc?

On the right Info pane, there is listed both the Drive Information and under that, the Disc Information.

But the section beneath, spanning both panes, is blank. That is where the specific disc files that one can check or uncheck should be.

This would be much easier if I could post a screenshot, but attachments aren’t usually allowed in forums, hence my attempt above to describe what I see.

Another thing: you didn’t reply to my query as to what the Backup icon does. Does it make a playable backup of the disc? If so, since VLC is listed as apps that can play MakeMKV files, what should I select (of the many files and several folders that the backup consists of) if I want to play the backed up Blu-ray disc?

*Now, right now my Blu-Ray external drive is occupied, so for a test, I put a normal DVD into the internal optical drive in the MacBook Pro (Apple doesn’t natively support Blu-Ray) and opened MakeMKV on that Mac, and there, when the app opened, there was the big fat hd icon in the middle of the window. Clicking on that launched a scan of the inserted disc and populated the files area. So on the MBP it works as advertised, though with a normal DVD, not a Blu-Ray disc. But that is not what happened on the Mac Mini with a Blu-Ray disc in the external optical drive.Now the 2 Macs are running different versions of OSX, but the Mini is running a later/more recent version so I doubt that is the problem.

Mac Mini Server 2.3GHz Intel Core i7/16GbRAM/OSX 10.9.5
MacBook Pro 13" al unibody 2.53GHz/8Gb RAM/OSX 10.6.8
iPhone 6/iOS 8.1
Samsung SE-506CB/RSWD USB Blu-ray writer

[ndjamena]

Have you entered the beta key, maybe your trial has expired somehow. But then you shouldn't be able to make a backup either.

http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1053

What does it say in the log down the bottom?

VLC will happily play the M2TS files, but you really want to point it at the MPLS files, maybe the BDMV files or you could just open the folder and it should start playing. I can't tell, my VLC seems to be playing up at the moment.

There was a problem with MakeMKV running on one of the newer versions of OSX, but I thought it was fixed. In any case, OS can always be a problem, new ones more than old.

[ncmphoto]

Not the beta key problem. I am on my 1st day of the trial period.

You still haven't told me what the backups are for, and if they will play using VLC or similar.

In any case when I relaunched MakeMKV after loading a Blu-Ray disc, this time it worked as you had said - I got the big hd icon and clicking on that produced the files on the disc.

I live in France and most films released here have French as the default language, though the original language is usually an option, as well as subtitles. With normal DVDs, when one rips to a video TS folder, the contents include the Menu, and thus one can choose language and subtitle preferences. With VLC I don't see that - the film just plays. Unless I have just not figured out how to enable a menu option. So when I got the disc files of this (originally in English) film, I unchecked all the audio that was in French, and left checked all the ones that were in English. that seems to work, and the film plays in English. I would love to know what all those files mean. Is there somewhere one can find that information?

[ndjamena]

Backups are "for" whatever you'd like. I've used them when MakeMKV doesn't manage to rip a titles properly from a disc. Two of the Episodes of Iron Man: Armoured Adventures had 16 bit PCM audio, yet they were part of the same title as the rest of the episodes which had 24 bit PCM audio. At the time MakeMKV didn't check if the audio codec specs in each segment of a title were the same so it just assumed the 16 bit PCM was 24 bit like the other episodes and blindly copied it as if it was 24 bit, but since it was only two thirds the size of the 24 bit audio there wasn't enough data to fill the track properly so it filled the empty space after each frame with silence. The end result was a mess, so I did a backup of the disc and extracted each episode from their respective M2TS files individually using MKVMerge. The Star Trek Access Episodes are Java Titles, since they were made up of multiple segments MakeMKV could only present each segment individually, however the Access Episodes were simply the actual episodes with PIP, audio over audio and PGS graphics so I did a backup of the disc and extracted the Access tracks from the playlists of the actual episodes using EAC3To. You could make a backup then burn the files onto a BD-R, or run the files through BDRebuilder to reduce the disc to a smaller size. And yes, you can play the Backups as if they were actual Blu Ray discs using VLC or any other program capable of reading a blu ray structure from a hard drive.

MakeMKV removes all menus (except chapters) when it transfers the tracks to an MKV. Matroska files aren't capable of including proper menus yet, VLC should be able to play DVD menus from TS folders though, just not from BD structures.

This will tell you how a BD is structured:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Di ... _standards

Ultimately it's just a disc with files on it, if you move the files somewhere else it works just as well as it does on the disc.

[ncmphoto]

Thanks for the information. I need to learn more about Blu-Ray but I think I can get a basic rip now.

[Steerpike58]

I have a question similar to the one asked by the OP, so I'll tag my question here. I successfully did a 'backup' of a blueray disk to my hard drive, resulting in ~50 GB of files / folders.

When I launch VLC, the only relevant option seems to be 'open file'. When I do that, I can choose the parent folder, which is named after the disc, or I can select any one of three files/folders - BDMV (file), Certificate (Folder), and MakeMKV (Folder). If I choose to open the parent folder, OR, the BDMV file, VLC embarks on a long process of seemingly playing every file in the folder structure, many of which are not playable, some of which are (warnings, trailers, special features, etc). Eventually it will start playing the movie (in this case, 00461.m2ts). But obviously, this isn't the best way to go. It seems like the .m2ts files are not exposed to the file system directly so I can't just browse to it.

[Woodstock]

In VLC, you should open the index.bdmv file in the BDMV directory.

But if you're looking to copy the individual movie, you should not be using "Backup" mode - you should click on the large button that looks like a disk, and open the disk instead. Then you can select the main feature, and convert it to an MKV file.

[Steerpike58]

In VLC, you should open the index.bdmv file in the BDMV directory.

But if you're looking to copy the individual movie, you should not be using "Backup" mode - you should click on the large button that looks like a disk, and open the disk instead. Then you can select the main feature, and convert it to an MKV file.

The only directories are the Certificate and MakeMKV folders. There is a file called 'BDMV'. However, 'get info' on that 'file' shows it is an 'AVCHD Collection', so I guess it's a set of files/folders combined into a single object. When I point VLC to that object, that's when it goes through the process of playing every object contained within it (trailers, intros, warnings, etc). If I wait long enough, it eventually does play the movie. Anyway - silly as it may seem, I didn't realize that I should be hitting that 'large button that looks like a disk' ... I see a number of other users being thrown by that! Is there a menu item that replicates that button action? It just never occurred to me to click on it. I'm now ripping just the titles as yielded by hitting that 'big button' ...

[Woodstock]

The buttons at the top are, left to right, "Open" (same as big button), "Backup", "Save selected titles" (duplicates a button that is on the screen after you Open the disk), "Stream" (something I'm told works, but I never use), "Preferences", and "Eject disk".

The Big Button used to be more obvious, but "User Interface Standards" said buttons should not look like buttons anymore, so its "edges" were "flattened" a few years back.