.MKV chapters, Metadata - how to describe file contents

[iamjcl]

While MKVs are great at simplifying file structure etc., it has become challenging to know the contents of each file without the menu structure BR or DVD had.

I've made .MKVs of many home video DVD masters at this point, and have added chapters to some using MKVtoolnix.

While this works, it is slow and cumbersome, as I have to watch / scrub the file with VLC, write down the chapter start times, then enter them into MKVtoolnix, then remux the file.

So 3 basic questions:

1) Is there a simpler way to watch / scrub the file while marking the chapters and exporting a chapter .xml all from the same program, without manually writing down times etc...?

2) I also am looking for a way to have a description of what exactly is in each video file - could this be part of the chapter .xml? Something I could possibly access before playing it?

3) Is there a way to embed a .jpg or similar into the .MKV, and can common playback apps (plex, kodi, typical blu ray players etc...) access this embedded image?

Thanks for any direction.

[mike admin]

I'm surprised this post is from 2018
You probably have to enable expert mode in preferences. Once you do that, right in MakeMKV you would be able to edit/rename chapters, change title name/metadata and enable jpeg/png image to be embedded in MKV (if present on disc).

[iamjcl]

I'm surprised this post is from 2018
You probably have to enable expert mode in preferences. Once you do that, right in MakeMKV you would be able to edit/rename chapters, change title name/metadata and enable jpeg/png image to be embedded in MKV (if present on disc).

OK thanks, but not sure this is what I need to do.

These are not commercial DVDs or BRs (I've ripped all my commercial DVDs BRs and UHDBRs, but don't need to change the chapters etc... on any of those).

These are DVDs burned from a source that had no original chapters.

Are you saying you can specify start / end times in MakeMKV and create chapters?

There are no .jpg files embedded - as stated, these are not ripped from a commercial DVD - no image was ever embedded in the disc, which is why I was curious about different ways to do it (MKVtoolNix for example).

Expert mode is enabled in my MKV instance(s) already.

Thanks

[Woodstock]

MakeMKV really has nothing to help with adding chapters to existing DVDs during the rip. Mike's line about "(if present on disc)" is the key; you would have to have added them during the disk creation for MakeMKV to find them.

You can merge them in to the resulting MKV file, as you mentioned doing elsewhere with mkvtoolnix tools, but MakeMKV can't do it as part of the rip.

[iamjcl]

Ok thanks - pretty much what I thought, just wanted to make sure he wasn't suggesting something I'd missed.

I guess it's more of a general .MKV question, rather than MakeMKV specific, but just wondering how people are doing these things, and what some options are to replace the Menus that you lose when going from full ISO DVD or BR to a single .MKV file.

Just a little info on the clips in the file (maybe could do in a .jpg if I could embed that - but some players don't show thumbnails) would be nice, but chapter stops are a must on a file with multiple clips.

I guess I can continue doing it the slow way (manually scraping through the video and writing down on paper the times I want chapters to begin...), but would be nice to have that functionality built into a player of some sort (VLC etc...)

Thanks