Can MakeMKV Determine Movie Title from DVD?

[ember1205]

I know that BluRay discs have a text file on them with some relevant information that pertains to the Movie Title of the disc (Like Jaws or Taken 2). Does MakeMKV have a consistent way to determine the movie name of a movie that's on a standard DVD?

I've built a Linux host to automatically rip my entire movie collection and move the resultant files over to my Plex media server. It's an entirely headless system, no GUI, and everything runs entirely on its own once you push the disc into the drive. The problem I'm dealing with at the moment is that DVD's are not being named something useful when they're getting ripped. This leaves me with the chore of accessing the movie folders, playing them to see what the movie title is, then renaming them appropriately.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

[Woodstock]

The answer is... It depends upon the DVD. Not all of them have title information present.

I do know that, if it IS there, MakeMKV will try to use it, at least in the GUI.

[ember1205]

"Where" is the info located or available from? In other words, how would I be able to tell if MakeMKV were able to locate data to use for a title or not? The closest I've seen with the GUI version was it naming the movie files according to the disc name (which isn't always the movie title).

[d00zah]

I believe it just reads the disc label... which can be most anything... DVD_VIDEO, for instance. Only as good as the authoring.

[ember1205]

That's fairly inaccurate / unreliable / useless.

Actually, the fact that the disc label is SO unreliable is why I'm wondering if there's information stored either on the disc or buried in the media files. BluRay discs have information in a text file. SOME plain DVD's have a "disc.id" file that has partial title info, but it is also not highly accurate.

I've tried querying some of the vob files with mediainfo, but that only gives me back the filename.

[Woodstock]

What you're kind of asking for is the DVD/BD equivalent of the CDDB described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB

The theory is simple - a "signature" for a disk is obtained, and someone inputs the information for that disk's signature into the database. Someone else can query it, based on the signature, and get back information.

I've seen people post about doing just that for as long as I've been ripping disks (7+ years now), but have not seen it. I suspect that some of the commercial, subscription-based ripping solutions have their own internal databases that do it within their programs, but I have no proof of that.

[ember1205]

The theory is simple - a "signature" for a disk is obtained, and someone inputs the information for that disk's signature into the database. Someone else can query it, based on the signature, and get back information.

I've seen people post about doing just that for as long as I've been ripping disks (7+ years now), but have not seen it. I suspect that some of the commercial, subscription-based ripping solutions have their own internal databases that do it within their programs, but I have no proof of that.

A crowd-sourced DB is almost certainly the only way it will work. TMDB already has a -LOT- of info, if only they would add fields for the various DVD signatures and language combos... We could query that directly.

[BigTulsa]

A crowd-sourced DB is almost certainly the only way it will work. TMDB already has a -LOT- of info, if only they would add fields for the various DVD signatures and language combos... We could query that directly.

Since I have been ripping my BR collection to LAN storage (NAS), for me it's really not all that difficult to grab the proper title of the film and use it as my subdirectory within the file structure (I use SPMC and Shield TV setup...SPMC is just a fork of Kodi). SPMC then on library updates queries TMDB and adds all the information I need for it.

[ember1205]

A crowd-sourced DB is almost certainly the only way it will work. TMDB already has a -LOT- of info, if only they would add fields for the various DVD signatures and language combos... We could query that directly.

Since I have been ripping my BR collection to LAN storage (NAS), for me it's really not all that difficult to grab the proper title of the film and use it as my subdirectory within the file structure (I use SPMC and Shield TV setup...SPMC is just a fork of Kodi). SPMC then on library updates queries TMDB and adds all the information I need for it.

If you read my original post again, you'll see that my question is in reference to standard DVD's and -not- BluRay discs since the BluRay format includes a file that contains title information.

[Woodstock]

Correction - a BD can contain a file which can include title information. There is no guarantee that it will be there or that it will have what a reasonable person would consider "valid information".

Again, it's down to disk authoring, and some companies are particularly bad at it.

[ember1205]

Correction - a BD can contain a file which can include title information. There is no guarantee that it will be there or that it will have what a reasonable person would consider "valid information".

Again, it's down to disk authoring, and some companies are particularly bad at it.

True.

But, even if only HALF of the BluRay's contain the file, that's significantly better than the 0% of DVD's. And, whether the title is perfect or not on the BluRay, it's "good enough" to allow utilities like Filebot to correctly rename the file almost all of the time.

[Krawk]

The answer is... It depends upon the DVD. Not all of them have title information present.

I do know that, if it IS there, MakeMKV will try to use it, at least in the GUI.

I wish if the title was known it would consistently name the corresponding mkv file consistently. Sometimes we see "nameofmovie_t00.mkv" and other times we see "title00.mkv" -in each case the volume label of the disc is shown on the screen.

[brellyn]

The only way I could see a reliable solution is a hashed database built specifically for MakeMKV.

I just ripped the"Sleeping Beauty" DVD (not the Disney version). My batch file built a folder called "Sleeping Beauty" and when complete, the movie in the folder was "Sleeping Beauty.mkv".. so, I ripped the DVD "The Brown Bunny". My batch file built a folder called "The Brown Bunny" and when it finished, the movie inside was named "The Brown Bunny.mkv"... so, I ripped the BluRay movie "Hitch". It created a folder called "Logical Volume ID" and when finished, the movie inside was "Logical Volume ID.mkv".

The complete opposite of your experience.

It comes down to the authoring house and their adherence to authoring standards.

I'd contribute if someone was willing to crowd source an online database. Don't see how it could be sustainable though.

[michaelsheppard789]

hi brellyn, you are right thanks for sharing idea

[cspotrun79]

I built a tool to help , getdvdtitle reads the checksum of the dvd then queries the microsoft media player api to return the dvd title.

https://github.com/donaldsteele/getDVDTitle


if you can think of other features just let me know or submit a pull request.