Is there any point of MakeMKV now with DV support in mkvmerge?

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1

I’m using MakeMKV to create an mkv file from a decrypted BDMV folder.

As an alternative, I see that recent mkvmerge releases support Dolby Vision correctly in mkvmerge.

So my question is: if I don’t care about chapters, can I just use

mkvmerge -o out.mkv STEAM/000biggest.m2ts

Or is there still point of buying MakeMKV just for this purpose? I don’t care about chapters or removing audio streams.

2

Welcome!

Well, mkvmerge cannot make full backups of discs. And it can only work on unencrypted content.

I’d advice against using the M2TS as source files as an M2TS sometimes contains content aimed at different playlists. Other times the content of the movie is spread out across multiple M2TS files, often those aren’t subsequently named.

If you use a playlist as the source file, mkvmerge will only copy the data belonging to that playlist, nothing more (if there’s more content in a M2TS), but also nothing less (all content from all the M2TS files the playlist references).

And again, mkvmerge can only handle unencrypted content.

3

Thanks for the reply. So when using BDMV/PLAYLIST/000most_chapter.mpls, it should be doing comparable, if not identical mkv files to MakeMKV, isn’t it?

I mean my use case is running it on uncompressed over SSH on Linux servers, where MakeMKV isn’t really an option.

So with playlist source, will this work? Or since it’s so new, I’d better wait for this part to mature and potential bugs to be fixed?

4

Playlist support has been present for many, many years. You can use playlist files the same way you use other source files. Yes, it’s as easy as mkvmerge -o out.mkv BDMV/PLAYLISTS/<number>.mpls.

The problem is finding out which is the playlist for the main movie, 'cause it isn’t always the longest, nor the one with the most chapters (both might be the menu on a very long, rolled-out loop).

5

I see. By bugs, I mean bugs related to Dolby Vision stuff, as it’s only been included 2 months ago, whereas MakeMKV had it since early 2020. But I really like the open source nature of MKVToolNix, so if possible I’ll try to use it.

6

Ah. Yeah that makes sense. So far I haven’t had much feedback on support for DV in MPEG TS. What little feedback I have received has been positive. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t bugs remaining, of course.

7

All I can do is compare the MediaInfo between the two files, which so far looks identical, at least for the video part.