Suggestion: On-The-Fly Audio & Video Conversion

[Faber]

MakeMKV is a great tool, especially for ripping Blu-Rays. But I think it would be even better if it could convert the audio and video tracks after removing the DRM. I noticed that MakeMKV at one point was able to convert the audio via FFMPEG. I’d like to be able to have MakeMKV use FFMPEG for converting the video and audio tracks, while keeping the subtitles (i.e. ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c:v copy -c:a flac -c:s copy output.mkv). For Blu-Rays from 2011 and earlier, it would be also be great to have interlacing detection and deinterlacing as part of the conversion process, or at least optional de-interlacing (enabled in Preferences), perhaps with FFMPEG’s Bob Weaver Deinterlacing filter.

This feature could be an optional feature, since not everyone wants it, though I think most folks would want it. With this feature, there could be a tab in Preferences called “Conversion”, where you could have an enable/disable checkbox, and audio and video codec prefences for DVDs, Blu-Rays, and 4K Blu-Rays (since 4K Blu-Rays are already in H.265). The “Conversion” tab could have sections for codec conversion settings for different types of media (DVD, Blu-Ray, UHD Blu-Ray), which mainly only matters because 4K Blu-Rays are already in H265 and I don’t want to waste CPU cycles converting H.264 (AKA MPEG-4) content to H.265.

I and many others would appreciate this feature because it would make it possible to A) Make ripping and converting Blu-Rays more convenient by merging the two steps from the user’s perspective, and B) Allow the user to leave the computer for longer than 40 minutes, especially in the case of Blu-Rays from 2011 which require de-interlacing – a time-intensive process, especially on a dual-core CPU (as opposed to say, a six-core CPU).


If this conversion feature was added, I would be more than willing to spend the $50 on the paid version. I’m currently using the free version, but the conversion feature would be worth the $50 because it would simplify the ripping process substantially and it would be a more efficient use of time, especially if coupled with a disc queue.

[Woodstock]

"If this feature was added I'd gladly buy a license" is a popular excuse for not buying a license. "Just add ONE MORE FEATURE ..."

Not going to say anything more than that.

[Chetwood]

I agree. If you'd used the search function you'd seen people already suggested this and the question remains: why should Mike invest time in a feature that's available in tons of free programs like Handbrake, Staxrip, Hybrid, XMedia Recode etc.? You can use one of the batch tools available on this forum to run a script automatically after MakeMKV has finished that will encode the MKV MakeMKV has created with any of these tools.

[Faber]

I didn't notice this before, but there's an "Expert" tab that has some different profiles, including ones for converting audio tracks to either AAC or FLAC. Is it possible for me to make a profile for what I'm looking for? Or at least one for progressive scan videos and one for interlaced ones?

[Woodstock]

The conversions in MakeMKV are limited to audio, and some of them are rather CPU-intensive from what I read.

For video AND audio conversion, I use handbrake, after having MakeMKV rip ALL tracks for each title.

[Grauhaar]

MakeMKV is a ripping tool and not a conversion or compression tool. Audio conversion is simple because a fixed sample and bitrate is used to convert from one to an other format. Video conversion is complex and requires decoding the video and re-encoding the video, customized by many parameters and profiles. Take a deep look into Handbarke or VideoCoder (a nice GUI for Handbrake) to check how many options are needed to handle this. If this is implemented in MakeMKV and if the compression ratio or whatever is set wrong, the disc must by ripped again. For me, it makes no sense to implement this in MakeMKV and I'm sure that Mike concentrate his work on the complex ripping problematic and not on implementing things which are already available with other tools.

If this conversion feature was added, I would be more than willing to spend the $50 on the paid version. I’m currently using the free version, but the conversion feature would be worth the $50

You are using a very good tool for free and want that much more features are added before you buy it? Please think about your statement ...

[Woodstock]

Another consideration - your time. Video encoding is not fast, unless you have specialized hardware. Even then, it's not nearly as fast as MakeMKV can rip a disk.

If you insist on doing encoding WHILE ripping, you get to sit there and wait for it to finish before you can put the next disk in.

That's not an issue if you have only one disk to rip.

It becomes and issue when you do something silly like buy all the Star Trek live-action TV series and have 184 disks to rip and encode.

(I really should finish that some day)