Simple hack makes USB DVD drive usable

[crouton]

Summary: Before attempting to rip a DVD with MakeMKV, first point mplayer at the link to the main video at ../VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.IFO and watch several seconds of the video.

Example: Suppose my user name is foo, and the disk name is FE_FI_FO_FUM. Insert the DVD into the USB drive and wait for it to automount (if it doesn't, you'll have to mount it yourself, which is beyond the scope of this tutorial.)

Code: Select all

cd /media/foo/FE_FI_FO_FUM/VIDEO_TS
mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 -vo xv -slang en VTS_01_0.IFO 2>/dev/null

Note: If you're not comfortable running mplayer from the command line, use SMplayer instead, this will still work.

After watching a little bit of the main video, cancel out and then run MakeMKV.

[bmillham]

Why do you need to do this? I can rip using a DVD with no issues.

[crouton]

Why do you need to do this? I can rip using a DVD with no issues.

Right. There seem to be a lot of issues using external USB DVD drives. In my case, if I don't do this first, I can't rip the DVD. I cannot tell you why this works, but it does.

Whenever I open MakeMKV, it says, "Cannot find usable optical drive". But I can still click on the Open button, browse to the VIDEO_TS folder, and then open VIDEO_TS.IFO. I can do this every time. But if I don't watch a few seconds of the video using mplayer first, I can't rip the DVD.

[Woodstock]

Question: Are you building MakeMKV, or using one of the "packaged" versions?

Another user was commenting that the snap package was not getting permission to read removable media, and that editing its permissions made it work. This work-around seems similar.

[crouton]

Question: Are you building MakeMKV, or using one of the "packaged" versions?

Another user was commenting that the snap package was not getting permission to read removable media, and that editing its permissions made it work. This work-around seems similar.

No, not using a snapd package. Building it, or adding the ppa:

https://launchpad.net/~heyarje/+archive ... kemkv-beta