MakeMKV: Interstellar blu-ray MKV conversion to MP4 fails silently

MKV playback, recompression, remuxing, codec packs, players, howtos, etc.
Post Reply
intelligo
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2020 12:20 pm

MakeMKV: Interstellar blu-ray MKV conversion to MP4 fails silently

Post by intelligo » Wed Sep 23, 2020 10:30 pm

Greetings! I routinely rip blu-rays with MakeMKV to MKV then convert it to MP4 with VideoProc. Usually, this works fine, but I recently attempted to rip the Interstellar blu-ray this way and failed during conversion from MKV to MP4. These are the steps I took:

1) Cleaned and dried the Interstellar blu-ray.

2) Loaded the blu-ray into a Pioneer BDR2009 internal BD/DVD burner (with latest firmware).

3) MakeMKV (latest version): ripped the blu-ray to MKV with no problems.

4) VideoProc 3.8: tried to convert the MKV to MP4 with these settings: Codec: H.264 (I also tried HEVC), Quality: "High Quality" (the maximum), Hardware Acceleration - NVidia: enabled, High-Quality Engine: enabled, Auto Copy: disabled.

The conversion starts, then a few seconds later the progress bar goes instantly to complete and an MP4 file is written to disk. There are no errors, but the MP4 is minuscule (~6 kb). I've tried various conversion configurations, but always the same result.

I also reripped the blu-ray to MKV, but no improvement.

I attempted to convert the MKV with VLC and Handbrake, but both failed without error in about the same way as VideoProc: writing a minuscule MP4.

I examined the MKV by playing it in VLC and  Media Player Classic, and the MKV played without problems.

I think I've seen forum posts from several years back that reported problems with the Interstellar blu-ray. Please advise. Thanks!
My Configuration
  • Optical Drive: Pioneer BDR-209M (aka BMK)
  • BD-R SL: 16x write/12x read
  • Windows 11
  • Ryzen 9 5950X - 16 cores
  • 32 GB DDR4 RAM @3200 MHz
  • ASRock Taichi X370 Motherboard
  • NVIDIA RTX 4070

Woodstock
Posts: 10333
Joined: Sun Jul 24, 2011 11:21 pm

Re: MakeMKV: Interstellar blu-ray MKV conversion to MP4 fails silently

Post by Woodstock » Wed Sep 23, 2020 10:36 pm

Since MakeMKV won't write MP4 files, and you say it creates an MKV file without error, the problem is with the conversion...

Can you play the MKV file generated by MakeMKV?

Given that the problem with the conversion to MP4 occurs with more than one encoder would probably indicate that the encoder can't write to the destination. Probably permissions.

dcoke22
Posts: 3108
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2020 11:25 pm

Re: MakeMKV: Interstellar blu-ray MKV conversion to MP4 fails silently

Post by dcoke22 » Thu Sep 24, 2020 4:51 am

Or perhaps out of disk space?

I have ripped that movie and encoded it as an h.264 without error.

Post Reply