MakeMKV unexpectedly joining files together

[SierraSam]

Hi all,

I've been ripping my Looney Tunes Golden Collection and have come across something odd.

Every now and then, MakeMKV will join several cartoons together. One will start right where another one ends. Is there a preference I need to set to prevent this? The only thing I've changed is the minimum title length to 240 seconds.

Thanks in advance.

[preserve]

Probably you've encountered a "play all" or some type of "play some" playlist.

I've run across "play some" type playlists before on discs, even if those playlists are not menu options when you play the disc on a DVD player.

Check the segments listed in the title that is resulting in multiple episodes ripped as one file.

Then check to see if those segments are available for ripping in the list of titles individually - they should be.

The exception might be if it's 2-part episodes and they've deliberately authored those 2 episodes together.

[SierraSam]

Strange. The info doesn't mention "playlists" but on every disk I've burned there are always "extra" larger files. Some are over 4GB and contain every cartoon in sequence. Some only contain 2-3. In those cases, the individual cartoons were always burned along with these playlists. It was only on one disk that it merged three of them together.

As a test, I re-ripped the problem disk. This time, I omitted all of the larger files. The playlists were gone and the missing cartoons got burned individually.

Thanks for the insight.

[Woodstock]

Different disks are authored differently. Even disks in the same nominal "series" can be authored in different ways.

For example, "Bleach" is a long-running anime series. It was usually distributed with 3 or 4 (sometimes 5) episodes in one file, and it relied on menu entries to play individual episodes. During its run, though, at least two disk sets were shipped with each episode as its own file, and there was no "play all" option. Then they transitioned back to "all in one".

What you get is what they thought you wanted, even though they didn't ask you.

You will probably want a couple of post-processing tools. MKVtoolnix contains programs that can be used to split MKV files up in various ways. Handbrake will let you split files up into episodes AND encode their video more efficiently; for animated content, we're talking 70-90% reduction in file sizes.

[SierraSam]

Yup. I have Handbrake. Been using it for years.

[Krawk]

Pokemon discs are very commonly mastered this way. 1 title will have 3 episodes on it. Sometimes 1 title will also have an additional half an episode. So then you have to use mkv merge to merge multiple titles together to make it seamless. If you play the actual disc and choose a specific episode, it will go to the appropriate title(s) and chapters.