Ripping first TV series - tips?

[epicchancellor]

I've been ripping entirely movies but there are some shows I'd like to rip and I haven't ripped one before - can I just rip them like normal or any special tips or recommendations? Thanks!

[outlier]

It's basically analogous to having several movies stored on each disc. You'll probably need to watch a part of each episode to distinguish which is which and name appropriately. In my experience it's extremely rare for the episodes to be in order or have the same sequence across all discs--even in 10+ or 20+ disc collections where the discs seem to follow a pattern there will almost always be 1 or 2 discs that don't follow it.

I've only come across one show where MKVToolNix has to be used to split episodes that were combined in one file. A few shows basically use separate files for the regular and commentary versions of an episode, so it's more space efficient to use MKVToolNix to add the commentary audio track to the regular episode's file. Some TV shows (and a few movies) use PCM for their audio, which is the least efficient way to encode audio. For that I've used ffmpeg to re-encode the audio, e.g.:

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ffmpeg.exe -i input.mkv -map 0 -c:a truehd -strict -2 -c:v copy -c:s copy -c:t copy output.mkv

I use truehd since it's lossless (vs. using something that's lossy and having to decide which bitrate to use). I'm not fond of how ffmpeg mangles the mkv layout in the resulting file so I use MKVToolNix to remove the PCM track in the original mkv and replace it with the audio track from the mkv generated by ffmpeg.

Some shows (particularly Looney Tunes) can have duplicated audio tracks. If it looks like an mkv uses the same codec and bitrate for multiple audio tracks then I'll use mkvextract to split the audio tracks into separate files, and then do a simple binary comparison on the files to see if there's duplicates. If the files are identical then I'll use MKVToolNix to delete the duplicates.