TV series on Blu-rays often don't have titles in episode order...

[RasterEyes]

...making it difficult to know what's what until after you rip a disc.

Sometimes I can tell what's what by the length (duration) of an episode, playing episodes with VLC, seeing how long each is, and matching titles of the same length. This helps identifying extras/bonus material as well.

But it's far from a perfect method, especially with older TV shows with very consistent episode lengths. To make things worse, there are a lot of TV shows which don't display the title of an episode at a predictable time/chapter, or even display a title at all. I have to rip everything, then play episodes in VLC to match from-disc content to from-ripped-file content.

Also, if I don't know what's what before I rip something, I can't enter the proper metadata before ripping, and have to use MKVToolNix to edit files after the fact.

I was hoping that if I watched VLC log messages go by, I could figure out which title (in the sense that MakeMKV uses the term "title", which is different from VLC's usage) is playing at a giving moment, but if that's possible, I don't have sufficient understanding of the log messages to interpret the info.

Perhaps there's a VLC plug-in for this? Any other tricks other people use?

[Radiocomms237]

Assuming you're using Windows, there's an app called "Process Monitor" that will tell you which specific file is being accessed WHILE IT'S PLAYING in VLC.

[RasterEyes]

Assuming you're using Windows, there's an app called "Process Monitor" that will tell you which specific file is being accessed WHILE IT'S PLAYING in VLC.

Thanks for tip.

I'm seeing, for instance, that VLC is reading from G:\BDMV\STREAM\00063.m2ts while a particular episode is playing, but I don't see anything that exactly matches that file naming convention in MakeMKV, where the files names look like "00020.mpls".

There is, however, a "Segment map: 63" corresponding to "00020.mpls". That is definitely one of the episodes (judging from title duration/size), and with other episodes that pattern seems to hold.

One unfortunate issue is that using Process Monitor in Windows 11 sucks. There's a long unsolved bug where certain windows (typically belonging to admin processes) float about other windows (like those for VLC and MakeMKV) and you can't simply click on a window or its taskbar icon to bring the window forward. Only alt-tabbing works to get back to those windows after bringing the Process Monitor window forward, which is really obnoxious.

[Radiocomms237]

You are correct, MakeMKV drops the leading zeroes from the file names in segment maps, so a "63" in the segment map equals 00063.m2ts

For me, that's actually a bit of a PITA!

I "text-map" all my discs using Notepad++, which has a neat feature where you can double-click a word/number and it will highlight all the other instances within the document.

That's especially useful for finding what playlists contain which segments, but I have to manually separate the 00063.m2ts filename into 000 63.m2ts because MakeMKV drops those leading zeroes.

And aside from that, it's just darn confusing!

[dcoke22]

I've been looking for some older posts where Radiocomms237 and I both commented on the usefulness of making decrypted backups as a beginning step to creating .mkv files.

Here's that thread: Most effcient method to Rip new Makemkv files with subtitle and forced subtitles

[vestoon]

Hi all, I just started ripping yesterday and I've been looking for a solution to this.

I've been working on a python script that parses the log of makemkv:

Code: Select all

    # Read the log and find the lines we're interested in
    with open(log) as f:
        mpls_title_pairs = re.findall(r'File (\S+\.mpls) was added as title #(\d+)', f.read())

    # sort by mpls
    mpls_title_pairs = sorted(mpls_title_pairs, key=lambda a: a[0])
    # int parse the title number
    mpls_title_pairs = list(map(lambda f: (f[0], int(f[1])), mpls_title_pairs))

    print(f"Mpls, Title,")
    for (mpls, title) in mpls_title_pairs:
        print(f"{mpls}, {title},")

Output:

Code: Select all

Mpls, Title,
00055.mpls, 9,
00071.mpls, 4,
00072.mpls, 3,
00073.mpls, 2,
00074.mpls, 1,
00075.mpls, 0,
00076.mpls, 32,
00077.mpls, 31,
00078.mpls, 30,
00079.mpls, 27,
00080.mpls, 26,
00081.mpls, 6,
00082.mpls, 8,
00083.mpls, 7,
00201.mpls, 25,
00202.mpls, 28,
00213.mpls, 29,
00401.mpls, 11,
00402.mpls, 5,
00413.mpls, 10,
00601.mpls, 24,
00602.mpls, 23,
00603.mpls, 22,
00604.mpls, 21,
00605.mpls, 20,
00606.mpls, 19,
00607.mpls, 18,
00608.mpls, 17,
00609.mpls, 16,
00610.mpls, 15,
00611.mpls, 14,
00612.mpls, 13,
00613.mpls, 12,

Then you can put that CSV into a spreadsheet for sorting or whatever, I've carried on manipulating the data in python but it's not general enough to share, but in case it inspires anyone here's what I do next:



Which lets me select the titles in the same order. After ripping the same program can rename the files for me by grabbing the title number from the file name:

Code: Select all

        for f in os.listdir(files):
            m = re.match(r'.*_t(\d+).mkv', f)
            if m:
                title_no = int(m[1])