Help With MakeMKV, Chapters & Plex?

[XrayDoc88]

I must have a setting wrong in MakeMKV or Plex. Here's the situation.

I rip all my movies to the MKV container to watch using Plex. When I watch the movie in Plex and click on "chapters". it shows icons for every chapter. I can click on any icon and jump to that scene. However, the "next" button is always grayed out. The "previous" button is active, but if I click on it, it jumps back to the beginning of the movie instead of just moving back one chapter. I have the exact same issue if I use MKVToolNix to create a single title from multiple MKV titles. I append each video to the first source video and I have "create chapters" for each appended file chosen in the output section. When I play the remuxed title in Plex, there are chapter icons, a grayed next button and an incorrectly functioning previous button.

Does anyone else have this issue or know how to fix it? Thanks!

[CaptainProton]

The "next" button you're talking about is a next title button, not a next chapter. If you were playing from a playlist or watching a TV show, it would take you to the next episode or item of the list. The previous button takes you to the previous title. So those buttons are working as intended. The chapters menu works so Plex is functioning and your files have chapter markers. I'm afraid the only malfunction is in the wetware.

[XrayDoc88]

"Wetware"? I'm not familiar with that term. I assume it's a joking jab at me, perhaps referring to my wet brain? Thanks for the explanation. That makes good sense.

Perahaps you can answer one more question for me? Sometimes the chapter icons will be blank with no image. Sometimes I see images or more images on a different device, such as a nVidia Shield TV device vs. my computer. Do you know why this occurs or how to force an image to always display with the chapter "boxes"? Thanks.

[CaptainProton]

The chapter thumbnails in Plex are generated by Plex. This process may start as soon as Plex detects new media or it might happen at a regularly scheduled time; it depends how the server is configured. If you start playing something before Plex has generated the thumbnails, they will show up as empty (sort of the same grey as the rest of the Plex interface). If they all show up as black, which is most common with TV shows, its because the time stamps for the chapters are in the black between scenes (where you might fade out for a commercial break), so Plex snaps a picture of a black frame and uses it as the chapter thumbnail. If you were determined not to have black thumbnails then you could edit the chapter markers (though not with MakeMKV) so that they were all 5 seconds later, into where the scene had faded in. I can't speak to how the other devices generate or acquire their chapter thumbnails.