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[macdonjh]

I've tried ripping DVDs with a Mac mini and Apple USB drive.  MC21 tells me I don't have a suitable optical drive.  What do I need to do?

[blgentry]

MC for Mac does not rip DVDs. 

For DVD video, you can use Handbrake to make lossy (mp4) copies.  Or you can use MakeMKV for direct encryption-free transcodes.  MKVs end up being 5 to 6x the size of MP4s, but have no additional lossy qualities (as mp4s do).  Both of these are free.

For DVD-A content, you can use DVD Audio Extractor.  It's a paid application, but has a fully functional 30 day trial.

Good luck!

Brian.

[macdonjh]

Well that explains a lot, but it's not the answer I was looking for.  Does MC for Windows rip DVDs?  Is there a plan for MC for Mac to have DVD ripping in the future?

[glynor]

Does MC for Windows rip DVDs?

It will rip decrypted DVDs to hard drive. This is, essentially, a file-copy operation. It just puts them in a folder. You could accomplish the same thing on a Mac with the Finder.

The sources have to be decrypted, though, which means you need either:
* Source discs that have no CSS on them (which rules out all major commercial movies and TV show DVDs)
* A separate real-time decrypting driver like AnyDVD.

There is a tool kinda like AnyDVD for the Mac called Fairmount, but I don't know anything about it, or whether it works well or not.

For the record, even though I have MC on many Windows machines, and I own AnyDVD HD, I've never used the built-in ripping in MC, which rips the discs into ungainly folders full of IFO/VOB sets. MakeMKV is, IMHO, the way to go.

[macdonjh]

Thanks for the tips.  So if I use MakeMKV to do the ripping, will I then be able to use MC to manage and play the movies formerly on DVD?

[blgentry]

Thanks for the tips.  So if I use MakeMKV to do the ripping, will I then be able to use MC to manage and play the movies formerly on DVD?

Yes!  I play DVD rips from MakeMKV and Handbrake very frequently.  MC21 for Mac has vastly improved video support (compared to MC20) and makes managing and watching a video collection a real pleasure. 

Brian.

[macdonjh]

Brian,

I downloaded MakeMKV and started using it.  I have a couple of questions:

Everything I rip is being placed in Video/Files.  I'd like to have my one movie and twenty-six TV episodes separated into Video/Movies and Video/Shows.  How do I do that?

The movie I ripped, Red, got ripped as 720x480, but it I know it's wide screen, and it plays as wide screen.  Shouldn't it show up as 1080 x ___?  Also, the only audio track available to rip is an English 5.1, but it only plays English 2.0 through my system.  How can I tell MC21 to play 5.1 channels?

I have the same question about the TV show I ripped.  The audio track is stereo, can I tell MC21 to play it through the center channel only?

[blgentry]

Everything I rip is being placed in Video/Files.  I'd like to have my one movie and twenty-six TV episodes separated into Video/Movies and Video/Shows.  How do I do that?

Change the output folder.  It's in the upper middle part of the interface before you press the "makemkv" button.  You can change the default in Preferences.

The movie I ripped, Red, got ripped as 720x480, but it I know it's wide screen, and it plays as wide screen.  Shouldn't it show up as 1080 x ___?

DVD video is limited to 480 pixels tall.  That's how it's stored on the disk; there are no more pixels to use.  Most widescreen DVDs are anamorphic.  Look it up if you're technically curious.  What it means in practice is that the widescreen format is horizontally "squashed" to make it fit.  A DVD player (hardware or software) knows how to unsquash it to make it widescreen again.

Also, the only audio track available to rip is an English 5.1, but it only plays English 2.0 through my system.  How can I tell MC21 to play 5.1 channels?

MC can play 5.1 if your DAC/Soundcard has 5.1 channels.  You can configure that under:  Player > DSP Studio > Output format > Channels .  Here are a few details:

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Audio_Setup#Channels

I have the same question about the TV show I ripped.  The audio track is stereo, can I tell MC21 to play it through the center channel only?

That's kind of an unusual question.  Many DVDs that are dialog heavy will have most of the dialog coming out of the center channel anyway.  Once you get 5.1 set up to send sound to all 5.1 speakers, you may find that it plays how you want it to.

But, this is MC, so nearly anything is possible if you want to do it!    You could do your own center channel mix if you wanted to.  In DSP Studio > Parametric EQ , you can do all kinds of crazy channel manipulations.  You can add channels together, move them, copy them, do crossover, etc.  If you were going to try to combine L and R into C, you'd probably want to reduce the volume of the channels first, and then add the channels together.  I haven't done that before, so I'd have to experiment with it.  Some other members here have a lot of experience with that kind of thing, so you could post a topic about it if you were interested.

Good luck.

Brian.

[macdonjh]

Apparently I didn't dig deep enough in the menus to find where to set up the multi-channel audio.  I'll look again.

I didn't know that DVD was limited to 480 pixels vertically.  When watching the DVD using a DVD player, the motion is smooth.  When watching the MakeMVK-ripped copy, quick, diagonal motion gets pixelated.  OK, not strictly pixelated, but there's a saw-tooth pattern to the edge of an image that's obvious and annoying.  I think the TV shows I ripped are going to be OK (filmed on video originally), but the more recent movies I ripped look bad.

[blgentry]

When watching the MakeMVK-ripped copy, quick, diagonal motion gets pixelated.  OK, not strictly pixelated, but there's a saw-tooth pattern to the edge of an image that's obvious and annoying.  I think the TV shows I ripped are going to be OK (filmed on video originally), but the more recent movies I ripped look bad.

Hmm, the distortion you describe sounds like interlacing artifacts.  You're describing it perfectly actually.  Generally speaking, DVDs of movies are not interlaced because they come from film.  DVDs of TV shows tend to be interlaced though, as many are shot on video.

I've been using MakeMKV a lot recently, but I also still use HandBrake.  I've ripped almost all of my TV series using HandBrake.  A lot of the TV series had terrible interlacing artifacts.  VLC media player has a deinterlacing mode built in (several actually) and it plays them quite smoothly.  MC's player does not (yet) support deinterlacing, though Hendrick said it's on the map for something they will probably implement.

So, after seeing artifacts in my TV shows, I re-ripped some of them and deinterlaced during the rip using HandBrake.  I either use "decomb: default" or "Deinterlace: Slow".

HandBrake can read MKV as an input, so you can use it directly on your MKV rips if you want to.  I'm not aware of a way to directly deinterlace MKVs without also encoding them into a format like MP4.  But I haven't researched it much and I could be mistaken.

Brian.

[glynor]

De-interlacing requires re-encoding the video itself because it actually changes the individual video frames. It really has no bearing on the container format (MKV vs MP4 vs AVI vs MPG etc). Handbrake, of course, re-encodes the video, so can apply de-interlacing. You can set Handbrake to output MKV files though.

That said, I'd also be pretty surprised if any modern DVD copies of movies were actually interlaced. That typically only applies to older, standard-def content originally recorded for TV broadcast (or, perhaps, sports content broadcast at 1080i60). Movie rips should essentially always be 24p natively.

Now, playing back 24p video on a 60Hz display will expose motion judder which you can usually see best in horizontal pans (especially sweeping ones). Perhaps we are just talking about motion judder?  And then, when you pause it, of course you're looking at a 720x480 source on a high definition display, so you'll see diagonal jaggies?

[macdonjh]

Video from both TV shows and movies seems nice and smooth now.  Perhaps the files needed to age on the hard drive, like whiskey in a barrel.

I also noticed that all video files rip to /Video/Files, but if the tag information is changed they will also appear in the Video/Movies or Video/Shows directories/ folders.

Now to try to figure out audio output so I can have 5.1 from the computer.  I guess my BD player isn't going anywhere for a while.

Thanks again for your help.

[blgentry]

I also noticed that all video files rip to /Video/Files, but if the tag information is changed they will also appear in the Video/Movies or Video/Shows directories/ folders.

Ah, so that's what you meant above about where the videos were going.  Those are called Media Views, or just Views.  As you've discovered, the [Media Subtype] field controls what is show in the various Video views.

You can set make your own views too, and set them up exactly how you want them.

You can also set auto import to set the Media Subtype on import for specific folders.  For example, if you put all of your TV shows in one folder structure, you can have auto import monitor that folder and add a Media Subtype of TV Show.  ...and of course you can always change them manually; it's pretty easy.

Glad to hear your videos look good now.  One step at a time. 

Brian.