How to tell which title is which episode of TV series?

[aravenel]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of ripping some TV shows using MakeMKV. What I am wondering is if there is a way of knowing which title on the disc (e.g. title01, title02, etc) corresponds with which episode. It seems that the numerical order of the titles is not always in line with the actual order that the episodes are watched in (e.g. title01 = episode 2, title02 = episode 4, etc).

Is there any way of telling which title corresponds with which actual episode? Perhaps runtimes? Is there any resource similar to IMDB or thetvdb that might be able to help?

Thanks!

[moviebuff]

In all the TV I have done they are always in order by track # on the disc. Havent found it any other way yet

[aravenel]

Hmmm... I've definitely had this issue. The biggest offender so far has been Mad Men.

Any suggestions on how I can tell which title is which episode?

[BitJam2]

AFAIK, there is currently no way to tell directly given the information makemkv presents. One work-around would be to do something like what CDDB does. One way to do this would be to collect a database of track titles from volunteers. Another way would be to scrape sites such as IMDb to get the run-time of each episode. If those numbers are accurate enough and you know which episodes to expect on a disc then you should be able to piece together the order.

Perhaps mike admin can tell us if we can expect to be getting the titles of tracks out of makemkv anytime soon. I have no idea if this is even possible or if it is possible, how difficult it is.

[aravenel]

Yeah, I don't think there's any way to do this based on what it's currently returning. I tried the IMDB thing, but it was tending to give me the full run time with commercials (e.g. 60:00) rather than the exact length of just the episode (e.g. 44:02).

Really wish there was a better way to do this. It's a serious pain if you've never watched (or dont remember) all of the episodes.

[d2globalinc]

I just posted this request awhile back

http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic ... 7011#p7011

- D2G

[aravenel]

Very nice. This would be super helpful.

I wonder if this is possible on Blu-rays as well...

[BitJam2]

@aravenel,

When I stream via "makemkvcon stream disc:0", There is some information about which files on the disc correspond to which titles makemkv will output. Here is an example:

Code: Select all

File 00441.m2ts was added as title #0
File 00442.m2ts was added as title #1
File 00443.m2ts was added as title #2
File 00444.m2ts was added as title #3
File 00346.mpls was added as title #4
File 00347.mpls was added as title #5
File 00348.mpls was added as title #6
File 00349.mpls was added as title #7
File 00811.mpls was added as title #8
File 00810.mpls was added as title #9
Title 00861.mpls is equal to title 00441.m2ts and was skipped
Title 00862.mpls is equal to title 00442.m2ts and was skipped
Title 00863.mpls is equal to title 00443.m2ts and was skipped
Title 00864.mpls is equal to title 00444.m2ts and was skipped
File 00807.mpls was added as title #10
File 00817.mpls was added as title #11
File 00147.mpls was added as title #12
File 01000.mpls was added as title #13

This information is also provided by "makemkv -r info disc:0". If the order of the .mpls files is what you are after, I have a Perl program that could easily tell you that order and can even make a video playlist in that order (so the titles with lower .mpls files come before the titles with higher .mpls files).

If you could run one of the makemkvcon commands I mentioned above on a disc that has the order of the episodes scrambled yet you know what the proper order should be, PLMK if using the order of the .mpls files would solve your problem and I will build that into my Perl program for you.

[aravenel]

Bitjam,

Very interesting! So essentially, if you were to sort the mpls files in ascending order, and pair this up with the m2ts that they correspond to, this would tell you what order the titles are in?

I think I might have to dust off my shell scripting and see what I can do with that... Very cool, and thanks for this!

[BitJam2]

Very interesting! So essentially, if you were to sort the mpls files in ascending order, and pair this up with the m2ts that they correspond to, this would tell you what order the titles are in?

I'm not saying that's true. I'm wondering if it is true and I'm asking you to do an experiment to find out.

[aravenel]

Ah, gotcha.

I'll tinker around and report back once I have a more definite answer.

[the_ravid]

Hey Everyone, sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but I tried what was suggested above and it worked. I've only tested this with Modern Family S1 BLURAY sofar, but I took the output in the log window that looked like:

Code: Select all

File 00800.mpls was added as title #0
File 00805.mpls was added as title #1
File 00801.mpls was added as title #2
File 00804.mpls was added as title #3
File 00802.mpls was added as title #4
File 00803.mpls was added as title #5
File 00806.mpls was added as title #6
File 00807.mpls was added as title #7

and reordered the titles ASC based on .mpls file name and it put them into the proper order.

I'm fine with reordering the episodes myself (since I'm renaming the files anyway). But I think it would be a great feature if MakeMKV would do the reording first and set the title based on the new order.

Just thought I'd post my findings incase it helped anyone else that stumbles across this.

P.S. Thanks to all involved for the amazing piece of software!

[AlexR688]

Hi guys.

Just been reading that you may have an easy way of telling which episode corresponds to which title on a Blu Ray disc. I have been having real problems with Mad Men recently.

I was hoping you would be able to enlighten as to how to do this: I have been trying desperately to do this, but I am not very good with Terminal, so did not really understand how you might have got this to work. (I can of course copy and paste code though!).

Thanks for any help!

[rotekz]

It would be great to know if any progress has been make on this as it is the only big annoyance I have with MakeMKV. It is really bad when you watch a series not in the correct order.

[DaveQ]

Unfortunately there is no way to map this for sure. It depends entirely on how the disc was mastered, and sometimes there's no rhyme or reason to it. The first title might be episode 3, because that was the first title added to the disc during the mastering process. It doesn't matter what order they're mastered in... the person doing the mastering just maps the appropriate title in the disc menus. I have ripped various television shows from DVD and Blu-ray containing a (seemingly) wacky or random order for the episodes on disc.

If you want to ensure they're correctly labeled for playback, you should check them before renaming or converting with HandBrake.

Some shows make this relatively easy. Open the file (using VLC or some similar video playback tool) and skip ahead to the last 5 seconds of the final credits. There you may find a production code. A good example is the show Chuck. In the last few seconds of each episode, the production code for that episode is displayed. It might say something like "3T7266." This can be checked against an online episode guide (such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_episodes) to see that it's Season 2, Episode 16.

This doesn't take too long to do, and it guarantees that you're watching the shows in order.

It's more difficult if the show doesn't display a production code in the end credits. In that case, I watch the first 20-30 seconds of each episode and match the plot against an online episode guide.

Dave