Endeavour Season 7

[s-nj-w]

Can anyone advise on the correct mpls for the 3 episodes on two Blu Ray discs in Season 7 please?

[s-nj-w]

Can anyone give me a clue as to how I would work out which mpls I would use for each episode, please.

[dcoke22]

Does it have some sort of track obfuscation?

Here's relatively recent discussion on how to find the right title on a disc.
https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16251

I don't have those discs, so I can't say specifically.

[s-nj-w]

Thank you, but good grief. That is waaaaaay to technical for me. I don't understand most of it.

I have no idea how to proceed.

[dcoke22]

What's keeping you from finding the episodes? Are there multiple choices that are the correct length? Or is it something else?

[s-nj-w]

Yes, many, many choices all of the same runtime. Disc 1 has 2 episodes on it, but all the choices show exactly the same runtime.

I think the mpls files are 'padded' to hide the real runtime and make all the same length.

In this way, you can't even narrow down potential candidates between the two episodes.

[dcoke22]

Do you know about MakeMKV's 'fake playlist protection'?

https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=16791

Some blu-rays are authored with a bazillion tracks of the same movie. When you stick the disc in a blu-ray player, the player runs a small Java program stored on the disc to determine which track is the right one. MakeMKV can run these Java programs too if you have Java installed. You can point MakeMKV at a JRE on the Protection tab of the preferences.

I'm not for certain this is what's going on with your discs. And it is not always the case that MakeMKV picks the right title, but it is a good place to start.

It is probably also worth understanding a bit about how blu-rays are put together. In MakeMKV when you select a title on left, in the 'info' box on the right you'll see details, including something called a segment map. For example:

Code: Select all

Segment map: 509,506,501,512,515,505,507,502,504,508,510,511,514,503,513

Blu-rays are sometimes chopped up into segments. Segments enable something called seamless branching. A title on a blu-ray can be thought of as a playlist of segments. The player plays the segments, in the order defined, and transitions between segments such that it is invisible. This, for example, enables a studio to put both the theatrical release and the director's cut of a movie on the same disc. The movie is chopped up into segments and one title is just the theatrical segments. The director's cut title is a playlist of segments with the director's cut parts swapped in. In both titles, most of the segments are probably the same.

If you make a decrypted backup of your blu-ray disc with MakeMKV and then go look at it, inside the BDMV folder (or right-click -> show package contents if you're on a Mac) you'll find a folder called STREAM. In that folder will be a bunch of segments with filenames that are <number>.m2ts. The number corresponds to the numbers in the Segment Map listed in MakeMKV.

You can play these m2ts files with Quicktime, VLC, mpv (https://mpv.io) or probably lots of other players.

How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

[s-nj-w]

By taking an unencrypted backup and looking at the files in STREAM, then back to which mpls file has the right playlist, I can see
that the episode called 'Raja' is 929.mpls . I hope that helps anyone following along.

I installed Java on my Win10 pc and installed makemkv 1.15.3, put the blu ray back in the drive and tried again. No change.
I still have a choice of about 1000 different mlps files and I don't get the message about Java being used.

Do I need to do anything more than install Java? I used preferences>protection and edited in the path to my Java binary.

[dcoke22]

https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=17643

That seems to be thread for details about Endeavour. Might be helpful to post your findings there.

[s-nj-w]

Yes, I have done so, but only have one mpls to contribute !

[s-nj-w]

Still hoping someone can help with this. Need the correct mpls for episode 1 (Oracle) and 3 (Zenana). I have continued to try to find the correct ones, but the resulting mkv files are all jumbled up.

[s-nj-w]

Oracle is :

Source file name: 00609.mpls
Duration: 1:32:56
Chapters count: 9
Size: 20.5 GB
Segment count: 11
Segment map: 504,507,501,506,502,500,503,2,508,510,505
File name: Endeavour Season 7 Disc 1_t237.mkv

Man, this is hard work. I feel like I have watched this episode about 10 times, trying to find it.

[s-nj-w]

Zenana =

Name: Endeavour Season 7 Disc 2
Source file name: 00857.mpls
Duration: 1:33:04
Chapters count: 9
Size: 16.3 GB
Segment count: 18
Segment map: 504,508,502,515,500,514,505,503,501,510,512,511,507,516,517,509,506,513
File name: Endeavour Season 7 Disc 2_t346.mkv

[ruff.hi]

Googled and found this ... https://misdirectedrequest.wordpress.co ... -episodes/

US Blu-ray PBS

Disc 1
Endeavour – s07e01 – Oracle 00609.mpls
Endeavour – s07e02 – Raga 00929.mpls

Disc 2
Endeavour – s07e03 – Zenana 00857.mpls