DVD to MKV! I finally get it! But now...

[Hopworks]

After countless hours, years, of googling the issue, after giving up, or walking away because I just didn't get it, I finally found the right key to unlock the doors that prevented me from creating playable MKV's from my archived dvd files. It took buying a Samsung 32" LCD with USB device playback abilities to give me the hardware tools I needed to test my results.

I broke through so many barriers today, and now have beautiful AND PLAYABLE MKV files from some old archived dvd files. FINALLY!!!!

At first, I had no video or audio, then I had video but no audio (and no error about audio codecs either). After reading here about HEADER SPLITTING and using no audio compression, I finally have working MKV's that play on my SAMSUNG LCD TV's just fine.

Now I want to take it further, which brings me to the "But now..." part of the subject text.

First, my environment. I'm using Windows XP Pro, not Linux (yet). I still want to use command line tools so I can script the process.

On my samsung TV, I can hit the left and right arrows to move roughly 10 seconds forward and back. Up and down arrows take me to the beginning or just before the end respectively. I have used this feature with a couple of pre-done MKV files and the playback moved to various places in the program (other than beginning/end as mentioned above) so I suspect chapter info is at work here.

So I tried my hand at chapter editing using MKVMERGE 4.6 but it is cryptic and I noticed right away when I needed to supply start and stop timecodes that the only way I would know those positions is if I played the video and made notes. Not very automation-friendly.

So I was wondering if there was a freeware tool that would extract IFO chapter info and generate a chapter XML or otherwise for MKVMERGE. Maybe something that takes the scene selection and translates it to something MKVMERGE can use to set points in the muxed MKV so when I press up or down on my SAMSUNG remote it takes me there.

I know this is a bit long-winded and I certainly appreciate your time. Perhaps, maybe someday, I'll find a way to script it to where I can analyze the video, determine the breaks, set the chapter points, and make that happen via MKV playback on my SAMSUNG TV.

Anyway, for anyone that searched and found this thread based on my subject line, here is what I did to play a created MKV from my DVD files...

I used MKVMERGE 4.6 and on the audio streams, I set compression to NONE. I did this because after my first tries, I used mediainfo on the results and noticed that the MKV's that played didn't have (HEADER STRIPPING) or mux line info at all. After I changed that, the files played flawlessly. I'm a serious newb to this kind of work, but I'm getting it finally. Thanks to forums like this one and the awesome info contained within.

Again, thank you for your time!

Hop

[fritzi93]

If you're willing to try a different program, HDConvertToX should be able to extract and automatically enter the correct timings (and subtitles) for you when making an MKV from a DVD. I've only ever used it for Blu_Ray, but it should work the same for DVD. Or load the DVD TS_IFO file in tsMuxer and copy the chapter timings, then load them in whatever.

[EDIT] And welcome to the forum. Good luck.

[jagabo]

MakeMKV?

[netmask56]

https://www.videohelp.com/tools/ChapterXtractor

ChapterXtractor extracts chapters timing from DVD ifo files.

[Hopworks]

Thanks guys for the advice. I'll try all those solutions. Just tried ChapterXtractor but the generated text file wasn't recognized by mkvmerge. It's just a start and I like that the first program I try pulls that chapter info. As a last resort, I can write a program to take that info and generate a proper file for mkvmerge. I'll try HDConvertToX also. I now have options, thank you!

Hop

[EDIT] After studying the chapter XML structure (mkvmerge), and mkvmerge option to look at the command line generated for a conversion, it seems pretty easy to automate the process now, using either C# or VB, or maybe even something web based like php.