Best Practices questions for ripping and metadata

Hi gang:

I’ve read the forums and can’t find anything particular for these items, so I’d love advice on the best way to manage these scenarios:

  1. Movies with chapters: if I rip a DVD or Blu-Ray, right now I do the main feature as one big MP4 because chapters just don’t seem to behave. Is there a way to rip with chapter markers inserted into the one file? Or with Plex able to understand that a chunk of files is chapter 1-2-3, etc.? I’ve seen how you can name files -pt1, -pt2, etc., but that help article also says it’s limited to 8 “parts” and some movies have 20+ chapters to them.

  2. Commentaries: right now it looks like the way to rip commentaries is to do another rip of the main features, but select the commentary audio track only. So…once that’s done, how to name the file so Plex knows? The Matrix Blu-ray for example has four possible commentaries.

  3. Episodes of series: Red Vs Blue on Blu-Ray rips the episodes to one big file. If I use the naming convention “S00E01-E99”, Plex very nicely separates out thumbnails for each episode, but launching any of them just launches the one big file, from the beginning. So what’s the best way to take content like that and have it able to play just a particular episode?

I’ve been having a great time ripping my content so my family and I can easily watch anything, any time. I’d just like to get details like these ironed out to perfect what I’ve got with Plex so far. Thanks!

  1. I personally rip as MKV. And this format has chapter support. But I think mp4 does too, it just is up to your ripping software to rip the chapters from the disc and enbed them in the right format into your file.
    If you experience issues with chapters please provide as much details as possible, togehter with log files (and ideally sample files) so the issue can be recreated and ultimately fixed.

  2. Look out for a software which allows you to rip all audio tracks at once and embed them into your files together. If you use mkv as file format, you can ‘tag’ each track with a title (although this title doesn’t appear yet in plex clients, it will sometime in the future)
    Meanwhile: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/832981/#Comment_832981

  3. use a different ripping software which is able to split at chapter boundaries or arbitrarily
    or
    https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/173648/howto-splitting-multi-episode-files-with-mkvtoolnix-gui

VERY cool - thanks Otto! I guess I should also have qualified: I’m ripping DVDs and Blu-Rays and decided to be OCD about it and throw in my commentaries and extras and such. So right now I have:

  • AnyDVD
  • CloneDVD/CloneBD/CloneDVD Mobile
  • A hodgepodge of ArcSoft stuff (TotalMedia Studio, MediaExpression, etc.)
  • Handbrake
    I’m going to give the mkvtoolnix thing a try, and start doing MKV. Much appreciated!

I swear by the combo of Makemkv and Handbrake. :slight_smile:

Make sure to read the guide for adding local extras

The toolbox also contains MKVtoolnix, mediainfo and SubtitleEdit.
Enables me to do almost everything I need, including local extras with several audio and subtitle languages etc.
I sure have other tools too, but I very rarely use them.