Easy way to get titles in order on TV series...

[hisdivineshadow]

I'm late to the party and everyone probably knows this already, but whenever there is a "play all" title, the chapters (episodes) will be in order - just an easy way to deal with out-of-order titles.

[Radiocomms237]

Yes, yes, and no.

Yes, late to the party

Yes, most of the time the segment map of a PLAY ALL playlist (if one exists) will give you the correct order of the segments, but no, nothing is 100% guaranteed.

It is possible for playlists to be split within MakeMKV if some of the segments have non-matching parameters. This will typically be denoted with a number in brackets after the file name, for example: "00001.mpls(1)", but not always.

The first 'part' of a split playlist's filename doesn't get a number in brackets, only the second and subsequent 'parts' do. And not all 'parts' of these split files are always displayed, sometimes MakeMKV hides split portions, especially if they are shorter than the minimum duration specified in settings.

I always make a text map of my discs before they get anywhere near MakeMKV. I have a regular household player next to my PC connected to a wall-mounted LCD TV, and I play every disc first and note down the names of the titles, the runtime and chapter-count of each title, and I sometimes take note of the first line of dialogue if several episodes all have the same runtime.

Then, working from a decrypted backup, I can play the segments directly from the backup folder to identify any with identical runtimes. But generally I just match the runtime and chapter count from the list of titles on the main MakeMKV window.

The naysayers here will likely chime in saying how I'm wasting my time doing this, but I very rarely rip any title without knowing what it is beforehand, and having done it the other way when I first started converting my media collection, it is my opinion that I wasted more time ripping everything and then trying to identify the tracks afterward.

And most of the time I had to go back and watch the disc anyway to confirm!

[dmdmmatt4]

Depressing that we have to do this. No wonder the world has given up on media when the media companies can't be bothered to give you enough data on the disk to play the content in the right order.
I look at CDs and lo, there's a CDDB with an ident and track listing for every CD (more or less). For video disks there's a movie database that requires you to have already turned up with the knowledge of what it is before you can find it. This is a fraction of the usefulness of the CDDB ..
I'm surprised no one has attempted to tackle this problem. In most disks case it would be straightforward to produce a discid as a key and generate an XML list of the segments of interest, flagging the segment with the main feature in, in particular, allowing everyone following you to get an automated rip of the right tracks, in the right order, without messing about.

[dcoke22]

In the United States, it is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from 1998 that makes it illegal to break DRM regardless of wether you're infringing on copyright or not.

CDs do not have DRM and it is perfectly legal to create a CDDB. DVDs, blu-rays, and UHDs all have DRM. Hosting something similar for video discs is more or less the same as trafficking in stolen goods, thanks to the DMCA.

The DMCA is a complicated law that implements treaties the USA signed from the World Intellectual Property Organization. The Library of Congress issues rules every three years updating a list of exemptions to the DMCA.

[dmdmmatt4]

I'm aware of the DMCA, and I would argue (though I'm sure they'd attempt to disagree) that all you'd be offering with such a database is "metadata" and there's no inherent infingement there. Let's face it, makemkv already walks this line and survives.
I know in a world full of lawyers the only safe answer is to shut up and do what you're told, but I'm pretty sure that's not the world even the lawyers want ..