Various issues with ripping and muxing software

[Schmengland]

To begin, let me just say that I am in the business of ripping uncompressed video and audio from blu-ray discs and DVD's to my external RAID controller, and that most of my home video library consists of anime. That means--you guessed it--I love me my subtitles.

Recently, to save a little on space, I have been doing tests involving splitting and cutting. Basically, I am trying to cut out the opening, endings, and next-episode previews from each episode of a given series. The problem I'm running in to is that I can't seem to find a piece of software that can do all of the following:

• Analyse a disc and display all available titles therein.
• Allow for the selection of parts of a given title via a range of chapters (or multiple ranges) in each title.
• Copy (rip) the data in that selection into blu-ray/DVD folder structure, or mux it into matroska containers.

In theory, the various components of DVDFab, a lifetime licence for which I bought a couple of years ago, would be perfect for the job, but I'm running in to a couple of snags.

First, it cannot rip from titles by multiple ranges of chapters in one go, necessitating that I rip one range, then rip the next. The problem is that, while each portion can be successfully ripped this way, the merge feature becomes inadequate because the program claims that said feature is not available for any passthrough templates or audio/video copy options. I am not keen on having DVDFab transcode the video, as I do not want to risk quality loss or any other potential issues that transcoding could cause.

Therefore, I tried ripping each title in its entirety to matroska, and then split each file using MKVToolNix GUI by defining timestamp ranges. This seemed to work pretty well...until playback, wherein my second issue came to light. Some lines in the subtitle track fail to display. Sometimes, it's because there are extra lines appearing on-screen to translate Japanese text, as if those signs translations are taking precedence. Sometimes, they are absent for no apparent reason, with no signs translations there to cause a conflict. Whatever the case, this does not happen when the title is ripped in full, either to folder structure, or to matroska.

tsMuxeR fails to merge matroskas into one folder structure. I can't remember the error, but searching online brought up results implying to me that tsMuxeR is out-of-date in matroska processing.

multiAVCHD refuses to mux two titles into one contiguous title that plays all the way through, instead adding each title as a separate video stream. Documentation claims that these titles should play back-to-back when there is no menu created or specified, but the reality of the matter is different: it just plays the first title and stops, meaning that one must right-click the video mid-playback and select the second one. I find this woefully unintuitive when I am using the JRiver Media Center and madVR in fullscreen exclusive mode.

I have searched high and low, but I can't seem to find any solution to this, and so, here I am. I would just like to find a tool--or collection of tools--that can accomplish the above without any needless side-effects.

As a side-note, I am also having problems finding an adequate eac3to GUI for the ripping of audio DVD's by chapter. AudioMuxer's FLAC encoder appears to be broken. Opting to use it allows the program to first rip each chapter to uncompressed wave reliably enough, but due to some unspecified error, the FLAC encoder fails to initialise. I am able to work around this by taking those wave files and converting them with JRiver, so that's not too big a deal, but it's still kind of annoying. HDConcertRipper appears to rely on outdated components that are redundant in Windows 10, and won't even start without some kind of unhandle exception. Just sayin': most of those rippers and muxers (or at least, their GUI's) seem rather broken. Are there any that function adequately?

[Baldrick]

You could check if CloneBD has any such cutting features with video/audio passthrough.

[Schmengland]

Mmm...I'll try it, but are there any freeware solutions?

EDIT: CloneBD won't open the disc. Says it can't copy encrypted discs, even though I have the same disc loaded into DVDFab. Other applications, like AudioMuxer and Clown BD, are able to copy data from BD's under those conditions, so I'm not sure what to make of that.

[_Al_]

ClownBD (it sounds like CloneBD but it is different software) has a checkbox to split by chapters, but it seems like a huge task for me, not sure how reliable that is.

[Schmengland]

Clown_BD is having problems demuxing. Saying, "The format of the source file could not be detected." Might have something to do with the subtitles, or the decryption. I don't know. I'm pretty sure it wasn't doing that the first time I tried it.

[Baldrick]

Mmm...I'll try it, but are there any freeware solutions?

EDIT: CloneBD won't open the disc. Says it can't copy encrypted discs, even though I have the same disc loaded into DVDFab. Other applications, like AudioMuxer and Clown BD, are able to copy data from BD's under those conditions, so I'm not sure what to make of that.

Have you ripped/decrypt the disc? With for example dvdfab to your hdd or install a backbround decrypter like anydvdhd or dvdfab passkey.

Clown_BD is having problems demuxing. Saying, "The format of the source file could not be detected." Might have something to do with the subtitles, or the decryption. I don't know. I'm pretty sure it wasn't doing that the first time I tried it.

Have you ripped/decrypt the disc? With for example dvdfab to your hdd or install a backbround decrypter like anydvdhd or dvdfab passkey.

[Schmengland]

I went ahead and ripped one episode off of the disc. Clown_BD does have the ability to split that by chapter, but does so erroneously, with the first chapter only being 12KB (it's two minutes long). It does not allow me to specify a range of chapters; it will only split all of them, or none at all.

[Schmengland]

Okay, I have just found some success.

1. Rip the content to blu-ray folder structure with DVDFab.
2. Use tsMuxeR to split the result as needed so that the undesired portions of its content are removed. There is no specific chapter splitting, but because tsMuxeR provides timecodes for each chapter flag, it's really a simple copy-and-paste job. (To produce a part accounting for all content from a chapter to the very end of a given video, simply enter all zeroes as the end point.)
3. Use MKVToolNix GUI's "append" feature to join and mux the parts back together in matroska (use the MPLS files in each as the input files).

Notes:
- tsMuxeR is a bit outdated, having not seen any development for two years, and therefore, its interaction with matroska files is wonky. Attempting to join two matroska files together results in an error at some position or another.
- tsMuxeR can, itself, join files and, contrary to common belief, it does not always cause audio/video sync issues (The Lord of the Rings is a special case). Regardless, attempting to join two blu-ray structures as one contiguous and continously-playing item results in subtitle errors. In this case, the final line in the first part refused to disappear even after the second part began, causing all subsequent lines not to fire.
- MKVToolNix/MKVMerge is better at joining matroska files together than tsMuxeR, but still raises issues of its own in subtitle display. Lines are inconsistent, some failing to appear, typically during scenes when there are multiple overlapping lines i.e. two characters talking at once, or signs translations appearing during dialogue. However, there were also times when neither of these conditions were met, yet the lines still failed to appear.

Given the above, we can conclude the following:
- DVDFab is easily the best and most reliable ripper/copier, albeit expensive and not the most intuitive, being that it cannot batch copy in folder structure (however, it can do so when ripping and remuxing to a container format like matroska).
- tsMuxeR is the best splitter. It cannot split directly by chapter, but has the easiest-to-navigate GUI to facilitate a timestamp workaround. It is, however, the worst joiner.
- MKVToolNix/MKVMerge relies on MediaInfo to display chapter information and other metadata, and is therefore not terribly intuitive for splitting. It also has trouble joining two matroska files together. It is certainly a great joiner when working with input files which are not matroska to begin with.

I'll keep testing this later to make sure this isn't just a big fluke. I would still much prefer a less tedious process than this; I'm working through three separate applications that are intended to perform most or all of these functions by themselves, after all. But I am happy to have found a viable solution. If anyone has any further suggestions, please let me know.

[Baldrick]

Have you tried use MakeMKV to make a mkv and then edit it with mkvtoolnixgui? But I guess you will get same problems with the subtitle tracks again.

You need something like dvdshrink(reauthoring mode with editing) for blu-rays.

[_Al_]

Clown_BD is having problems demuxing. Saying, "The format of the source file could not be detected." Might have something to do with the subtitles, or the decryption. I don't know. I'm pretty sure it wasn't doing that the first time I tried it.

There were new audio formats introduced lately like Dolby Atmos , maybe some others, you need latest eac3to downloaded,eac3to is demuxing software for Clown_BD. I must say I have never encountered Blu-Ray stream that eac3to would not read (with updated eac3to).

Otherwise, this is really a complex issue, to cut muxed BD streams, to cut all those audio stream, HD audio stream, to time subtitles again, to cut video losslessly (mpeg2, H264 and VC1, all flavors, progressive and interlace), what if there is no I-frame (perhaps it is), then it has to encode a part of video into particular codec with same parameters! codec and stitch it. And then there are syncing issues. It is no coincidence that software for that is not around. Usually it involves re-encoding if cutting off parts from BD. Very complex task to do, anyway it was perhaps designed like that with this in mind. There might be a workflow found that works for some BD but fails for other etc.

[Schmengland]

Mmm, okay. Makes sense. Still hope for an all-in-one solution from somebody someday, but at least I got it working. I appreciate the feedback.