MakeMKV

I've been using MakeMKV for a while to back up my movies to my laptop so that when I want to lie in bed and watch a movie on my laptop, or bring my favourite movies with me when I'm travelling, I don't have to think about bringing an optical drive and all of the disks in a pouch. I also did the same thing for my mother while she has been in hospital, which saved her from the horror that is daytime TV when she didn't have access to Netflix or Amazon Prime.

The files that do come out of MakeMKV are big, but in all honesty, it's not that much hassle to then put it into another application to compress. Combine MakeMKV with Handbrake or another similar application, and you can easily take a whole collection of movies and TV shows with you, or back them all up to access from around your house on a NAS or a media server. Particularly if you have a collection with a lot of difficult-to-source shows or movies (I have a few horror and dramas from Japan that have been difficult to source) or movies from multiple regions, this will save you from having to buy the movies twice.

While I haven't purchased YET (purchase isn't necessary during Beta, however a new registration code will be needed every now and again), I have every intention to when payday next comes around as it will be worth every penny. I have yet to find an application that does the same thing quite as well as this does.

This program makes it easy to select what one wants to extract (audio tracks, subtitles) from media or video folders. It works very quickly, however... size of files form DVD are huge - VidCoder (Handbrake) yields much more compact files of the very same quality, although takes quite more time.

First, I don't know who posted MakeMKV as a Freeware b/c it's not. It is a shareware. If you want to continue using it after a month, you have to buy it at 70$.

Next, I've used MakeMKV and cannot understand how they can expect to get any sales at that price when the software is so highly limited in it's functionality and usefulness. MakeMKV will rip your Bluray to mkv but will give you no control over the MKV's compression/quality parameters.

The trial runs I did with MakeMKV resulted in MKVs that are as large as the original Bluray media content. The beauty of MKV/x264 is that it can compress a 40GB movie to 10GB @ 1080p with minute loss of quality. MakeMKV does not take advantage of that, ripping a 40GB BD into 40GB mkv. How useful is that! At 70$ for a software that doesn't do it's job correctly, not very...

An alternative to to MakeMKV, would be to dump a decrypted version of the BD with the software of your choice (I used DVDFab) and the convert it to MP4/MKV using RipBOT264 which incendentally is free and it provided with a much larger level of control on quality and compression.

[Edited by MonkeyFiend, December 19]

[Edited by MonkeyFiend, December 19]

It does not convert the media into different formats, so it's actually a converter. Just to clear that up. So if you want to fit an 5GB movie on a 4GB DVD, this is not the program for you.

What's most annoying about MakeMKV is that it makes you re-register every month. Basically, you need to enter a new registration key each month in order for the program to work. Most people have no idea how to find a new beta key, so this is definitely a poorly thought-out feature.

The key can be found here. http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1053

Well, MakeMKV works. And it's incredibly simple, too. It really delivers on its promise to rip in only 2 clicks. Of course, there's probably other stuff that you're going to want to adjust on the side, but overall, the process is incredibly simple. Your iPod isn't going to support .mkv, but it's better than nothing.

i have been very impressed with MakeMKV, specifically with bluray ripping. it rips and encodes extreamly fast, faster than i have ever seen.

my only complaint is that it doesnt give much options for file renameing or pulling data off the discs, if you want to change anything such as video size or format, you have to use handbrake, but that just adds hours per video file. for the most part when rippin in full 1080i I suggest keeping it in .MKV as changeing it to MP4 and keeping the 1080i will literally add gigs to the filesize (please correct me if im wrong, i may have screwed up the settings along the way.)