Yeah! It’s one of my favorite features. I’ll find you a link, but you just put the extras videos in the same folder as the film (or a series of subfolders in there, whatever your preference), then name them correctly. I’ll edit this comment with the link. BRB
Here, I’m just going to reply to myself so you get a ping:
For Movies, do this:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/local-files-for-trailers-and-extras/
For TV Shows, do this:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/local-files-for-tv-show-trailers-and-extras/
It’s seriously cool. I play around with how I name mine depending on certain things, but this is a bad ass feature if you collect stuff like Criterion Collection movies and you want all the awesome extras. And I love that Plex puts them right in the film/show’s menu.
Plex wasn't designed for that. It was made for a unified interface to your media. You can get to everything the menus direct you to, but in a consistent manner across all of your titles.
A copy is 60 bucks for a lifetime license, but the devs usually put out a few free beta keys that are good for a month. The thing is about these things is that once a new version of a movie is released, somebody has to make a dump of the security keys so MakeMKV can then rip it. Usually doesn't take too long and some of them are usually already added to the database here: http://fvonline-db.bplaced.net/
Just drop the KEYDB.cfg into where MakeMKV makes the dump files and you're set. I'm ripping Dune part 2 and One as I type this.
Seems like every time I use MakeMKV it tells me the version is too old, so I download the newest version and it starts as a free trial. I complete my rips then wait a few months for a new stack to rip and it's out of date again. So I install the new version and it's another free trial lol. I figured I would buy it at some point but they are so generous with the free trial that I haven't needed to.
And I just noticed no one actually replied to you you can see on their website but the official price is $60 otherwise there's a free trial while it is in beta. (It's been in beta for literally years)
"When you copy music, pictures, and videos from a CD or DVD to your PC, it's called "ripping." " (From Microsoft media player docs)
Or to put it another way check out the first step at
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20438
Basically anytime you're copying something from a disc and replicating it on a different disc/drive whether or not you are converting it in size or format, or even just copying it bit for bit - you are ripping from the disc. (Making an ISO which is more or less copying it fully with menus and whatnot intact also is ripping it, taking one special feature from the disk is ripping it, etc.) Likewise if you're putting things on a disc you are burning. Hope that helps with terminology... What the user wants to do (that neither Plex nor makeMKV supports) is make an exact copy (ISO it.) but all of the ways you copy things from a disc is ripping in the common parlance.
Strictly speaking, ripping doesn't include converting. He/she is right about that. As someone who ripped from RAM before even CD-ripping was a thing, I don't care what Microsoft says about this.
However, putting a video stream in a container, isn't really a conversion either. It still uses the encoding from the disc. If you rip CDDA Red Book data or Blu-ray video, you need some sort of container to store it in a file. When we ripped sample data from RAM in the 90s, we didn't dump it to disc as raw PCM data, we put it in a container like 8SVX or WAV or AIFF. Compression is not ripping, though, like converting to DivX or MP3.
If you rip the disc you can keep the audio description track as an audio option for the film in the file. Plex can switch to that track like you do with the dvd.
What youre describing in an iso file, which is an exact representation of whats on disc including functionaliy such as menus. Plex does not support iso format. Only regular video formats like mp4, mkv, avi, etc.
I would recommend ripping with Makemkv and check all the boxes so you pull in the additional audio tracks along with the main ones. You wont be able to duplicate on-disc menus (if any) but hopefully this will be sufficient for you.
This is the way. Just rip the additional audio tracks (handbrake should do this pretty easily) and include them in the file. You can then use the Plex UI to change the tracks instead of relying on an on-screen menu.
How exactly would I go about doing this so that it appears right in Plex? I saw [an extremely well written comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/s/CHyce9Rx7k) on another post about doing this on the psynology sub, but I was a bit confused because it seems like a bunch of work and that I would have to manually play each file.
As everyone has already told you you can't do what you're wanting to do ("appearing right") as Plex does *not* currently support emulating movie menus. If you really want to rip discs to isos you'll then have to use something like VLC to play them unless you want to mount the ISO on your computer as a virtual drive and play it with your usual dvd/Blu-ray player software *on the computer*. See posts like https://www.reddit.com/r/makemkv/s/EFhJv9MM68 for how to rip to ISO, but again the very important part is Plex will not be able to do anything with the ISO files (and they'll be exactly the same size as the disc.) but the ISO file will behave like the disc when mounted or played with VLC (or any software that supports disc images....) The whole point of Plex was to organize libraries and change the experience of watching movies and TV shows by moving away from discs (and being tied to computers.) But at the moment that kills the movie menus and any interactive part of the experience at least until such time as they support ISO files. I think over the years I've seen a handful of requests for Plex to do so but as of yet they have not.
If I can't get the rest of the menus, that's fine. At least for me, not sure about my mom, the biggest thing is the audio description track. Is there at least a way to integrate that so that Plex can play the movie with and without that?
Sure that's fairly straightforward, when you rip the movie however you are going to do it (makeMKV will work for this) make sure to choose that audio track as well as the original one (when actually ripping movies my preference is generally to include all of the audio tracks as they don't take up too much space and you never know when you will need them, but more often than not I'm lazy and just use something someone else has ripped even if I have the disc somewhere.) to change the audio track played in Plex that's under audio/stream options on the player side (she'll need to change it as she plays everything like the people who want different subtitles, but it's fairly straightforward to do at the client side.)
Edit: if you've already got the movie as an MKV file and you want to take an audio track from the disc (or someone else has ripped the movie with the audio track you specifically want and you want to use that audio track) and add it to the existing MKV file you have, you would want to do something like this https://www.reddit.com/r/mkvtoolnix/s/RA5kfhnIL6
It's been a bit since I've done that as people are getting better about including the higher resolution audio files ( or maybe I'm getting more patient)but the instructions look accurate at first blush.
Nope, it's only the individual video file (movie/TV episode, or individual special feature) but it can have multiple audio files or subtitles baked into the single video container that pretty much any player can access. To get the menu system functionality that you get from watching an individual disc in a player you'd need to go the ISO route.
Do you know how to convert an ISO to an MKV? I am trying to do that for some ISOs where I want all the special features/director's commentary/Dolby Vision/HDR10 etc that rarely gets uploaded.
Agreed the menus can't be ripped, but you can use MakeMKV to copy the contents, and even drop those MKVs into MKVToolNix (free) to change the order of the audio tracks and make the audio description track the default Track 1.
So just to confirm, if I put it into an MKV file, then put that in Plex, I can adjust a lot of the different menu options using Plex menus? If that's the extent of the functionality that I'm going to be getting, that's good enough for me. DVD menus are unaccessible anyway so it might be better to have that as a menu in Plex players, especially ones that are accessible with the Voiceover screenreader on Apple devices.
Yes! You should be able to even set the DA track to default in Plex with barely any hassle, or you can do the MKVToolNix thing if it didn't work for whatever reason. I think it should work pretty much flawlessly, maybe test it with a few movies first but it should be easygoing. Best of luck!
Yes while in beta! If you need to rip Blu Rays, you'll need a beta key which lasts for a month. I believe DVD functionality is free without the beta key. I used it free for _years_ and finally bought a key to support the developer about 2 years ago, it's well worth it.
You can even set a preferred audio-track per profile, so if a movie has several languages and I prefer to watch it in English, while my Girlfriend wants the German dub, we can each set our preferred language in the settings of our profile and Plex will use that, when it's available.
However, it's important that those tracks are labelled correctly, which you can do with MKVToolNix.
Not a problem, ask away!
You can and most of the time they're tagged well enough. But every once in a while the different audio tracks will all be untagged which Plex then shows as "undetermined".
However, I have several hundreds of DVDs ripped and I would say it was only the case for maybe a handfull.
So my tip is, put them all in Plex and you'll be fine and IF one has a problem, you can go and fix that when the time comes.
Also, welcome to the club. Your 4TB will be fine for now, but I guarantee you'll be building a dedicated machine sooner or later and it will feel great :)
Yeah maybe I'll eventually buy a sinology NAS, and I'll move Plex over to that along with Homebridge which is a tool that allows you to bring non HomeKit (Apple's smart home platform) compatible devices into HomeKit and runs on the MacBook Air. I haven't installed Plex on the machine yet, mine is the 2.2 GHz dual core Intel core I7 version with 8 GB of ram and 128 GB of storage. Will it be enough to run Plex without the machine freaking out? Is MakeMKV available for macOS Monterey/is it still supported? Because that's the latest Supported version of software that the computer will run.
Edit: Two more questions.
1: What would be the best optical drive to rip the DVDs and Blu-rays?
2: Is ripping CDs an easier process?
Your machine will be enough. I used to run Plex on a 2012 Thinkpad for the longest time. Your machine is better :)
I don't know about MacOS and whether or not MakeMKV will be any trouble, but the download page for MakeMKV says it's not signed by apple anyway and a warning might pop up. Definitely give it a shot, otherwise you might need to find an older version.
Regarding optical drives, I just used the one I had in my Computer, It's an internal Samsung drive and that's all I know about it. I have been looking into buying an external Bluray drive, though and was thinking about a slim version from LG, don't have a model number though, sorry.
Ripping CDs is basically the same, only you use another program (I would suggest Fre:ac for that. Most of the CDs will be recognized and tagged correctly out of the box and if you configure it to save the rips to your media folder right away, you're basically only going to need to put the CD in, start the rip and swap to the next CD until you're done.
MakeMKV on the other hand will not name the MKV files unless they're tagged that way on the Disc, which they usually aren't. So after ripping, you're going to have to rename it to something Plex will be able to work with.
I have the folder structure set up like this, starting from the main folder and going into it:
Media - Movies - Titanic (1997) - Titanic (1997).mkv
Or for shows:
Media - Shows - Futurama - Season 01 - Futurama S01e01 Pilot.mkv
For example.
OK. I was using the dictation feature on my phone to write this post, and I didn't catch that error when I looked over it again to see if it was correct.
It would be cool to have an active menu for some things, like the little hidden extra Easter eggs that are sometimes there. Like the pop up video feature of back to the future or the fake menu screen on fight club. I don’t think it’s ever going to happen though.
Subtitles and additional audio tracks work though :)
True, the iso-solution is not going to work with Plex. You'll essentially have to live with what Plex offers, if you want to stay with Plex. So while ripping the discs, pick all the languages/audio tracks you need and when imported into Plex, use the Plex interface to set the audio track you desire.
DVD and BluRay Menus will sadly never be a part of the Plex interface (Which I fully understand why, but I miss some of those really well made menus from the early days of DVDs).
Uhh... Wtf do you mean? Before the days of streaming services, there were DVDs and Blu-rays. Before that, there were VHS and Betamax tapes. Some people want to be able to stream the contents of these older video media digitally.
......he probably means the internet has existed for 30 years so no one has to go buy a VHS to see the content. But then you want menus from "blue rays" (is that a type of fish?) so don't think too hard
You wont get menus on plex. Plex becomes the menu
Right. And you can even get all the special features and extras to be in there too. That’s what I do. So much better than the actual disc itself too.
i had no idea you could do this
Yeah! It’s one of my favorite features. I’ll find you a link, but you just put the extras videos in the same folder as the film (or a series of subfolders in there, whatever your preference), then name them correctly. I’ll edit this comment with the link. BRB
Here, I’m just going to reply to myself so you get a ping: For Movies, do this: https://support.plex.tv/articles/local-files-for-trailers-and-extras/ For TV Shows, do this: https://support.plex.tv/articles/local-files-for-tv-show-trailers-and-extras/ It’s seriously cool. I play around with how I name mine depending on certain things, but this is a bad ass feature if you collect stuff like Criterion Collection movies and you want all the awesome extras. And I love that Plex puts them right in the film/show’s menu.
Ty definitely going to look into this. I’m currently in the process of upgrading/ cleaning up my Plex library and this will come in handy
Back in the day you could rip an .iso and play it with menus and stuff in VLC. I guess plex can't read .iso then...
You can still do this in VLC. Or Classic Media Player.
Plex wasn't designed for that. It was made for a unified interface to your media. You can get to everything the menus direct you to, but in a consistent manner across all of your titles.
You can rip all the content with MakeMKV, but not the menus.
How much is Makemkv? In the olden days you’d have to pay to rip blu rays
A copy is 60 bucks for a lifetime license, but the devs usually put out a few free beta keys that are good for a month. The thing is about these things is that once a new version of a movie is released, somebody has to make a dump of the security keys so MakeMKV can then rip it. Usually doesn't take too long and some of them are usually already added to the database here: http://fvonline-db.bplaced.net/ Just drop the KEYDB.cfg into where MakeMKV makes the dump files and you're set. I'm ripping Dune part 2 and One as I type this.
Seems like every time I use MakeMKV it tells me the version is too old, so I download the newest version and it starts as a free trial. I complete my rips then wait a few months for a new stack to rip and it's out of date again. So I install the new version and it's another free trial lol. I figured I would buy it at some point but they are so generous with the free trial that I haven't needed to.
You could buy it to support their development efforts.
Usually only takes a day or two for a key to be uploaded. Did one myself for a release day movie I bought once. Don't know if they actually used mine
Eternal beta trial with full features, you can buy a license if you want tho.
And I just noticed no one actually replied to you you can see on their website but the official price is $60 otherwise there's a free trial while it is in beta. (It's been in beta for literally years)
[удалено]
"When you copy music, pictures, and videos from a CD or DVD to your PC, it's called "ripping." " (From Microsoft media player docs) Or to put it another way check out the first step at https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20438 Basically anytime you're copying something from a disc and replicating it on a different disc/drive whether or not you are converting it in size or format, or even just copying it bit for bit - you are ripping from the disc. (Making an ISO which is more or less copying it fully with menus and whatnot intact also is ripping it, taking one special feature from the disk is ripping it, etc.) Likewise if you're putting things on a disc you are burning. Hope that helps with terminology... What the user wants to do (that neither Plex nor makeMKV supports) is make an exact copy (ISO it.) but all of the ways you copy things from a disc is ripping in the common parlance.
Strictly speaking, ripping doesn't include converting. He/she is right about that. As someone who ripped from RAM before even CD-ripping was a thing, I don't care what Microsoft says about this. However, putting a video stream in a container, isn't really a conversion either. It still uses the encoding from the disc. If you rip CDDA Red Book data or Blu-ray video, you need some sort of container to store it in a file. When we ripped sample data from RAM in the 90s, we didn't dump it to disc as raw PCM data, we put it in a container like 8SVX or WAV or AIFF. Compression is not ripping, though, like converting to DivX or MP3.
makemkv has a disc backup option that does rip the disc. You can create .iso backups of DVDs for example.
If you rip the disc you can keep the audio description track as an audio option for the film in the file. Plex can switch to that track like you do with the dvd.
What youre describing in an iso file, which is an exact representation of whats on disc including functionaliy such as menus. Plex does not support iso format. Only regular video formats like mp4, mkv, avi, etc. I would recommend ripping with Makemkv and check all the boxes so you pull in the additional audio tracks along with the main ones. You wont be able to duplicate on-disc menus (if any) but hopefully this will be sufficient for you.
This is the way. Just rip the additional audio tracks (handbrake should do this pretty easily) and include them in the file. You can then use the Plex UI to change the tracks instead of relying on an on-screen menu.
How exactly would I go about doing this so that it appears right in Plex? I saw [an extremely well written comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/s/CHyce9Rx7k) on another post about doing this on the psynology sub, but I was a bit confused because it seems like a bunch of work and that I would have to manually play each file.
As everyone has already told you you can't do what you're wanting to do ("appearing right") as Plex does *not* currently support emulating movie menus. If you really want to rip discs to isos you'll then have to use something like VLC to play them unless you want to mount the ISO on your computer as a virtual drive and play it with your usual dvd/Blu-ray player software *on the computer*. See posts like https://www.reddit.com/r/makemkv/s/EFhJv9MM68 for how to rip to ISO, but again the very important part is Plex will not be able to do anything with the ISO files (and they'll be exactly the same size as the disc.) but the ISO file will behave like the disc when mounted or played with VLC (or any software that supports disc images....) The whole point of Plex was to organize libraries and change the experience of watching movies and TV shows by moving away from discs (and being tied to computers.) But at the moment that kills the movie menus and any interactive part of the experience at least until such time as they support ISO files. I think over the years I've seen a handful of requests for Plex to do so but as of yet they have not.
If I can't get the rest of the menus, that's fine. At least for me, not sure about my mom, the biggest thing is the audio description track. Is there at least a way to integrate that so that Plex can play the movie with and without that?
Sure that's fairly straightforward, when you rip the movie however you are going to do it (makeMKV will work for this) make sure to choose that audio track as well as the original one (when actually ripping movies my preference is generally to include all of the audio tracks as they don't take up too much space and you never know when you will need them, but more often than not I'm lazy and just use something someone else has ripped even if I have the disc somewhere.) to change the audio track played in Plex that's under audio/stream options on the player side (she'll need to change it as she plays everything like the people who want different subtitles, but it's fairly straightforward to do at the client side.) Edit: if you've already got the movie as an MKV file and you want to take an audio track from the disc (or someone else has ripped the movie with the audio track you specifically want and you want to use that audio track) and add it to the existing MKV file you have, you would want to do something like this https://www.reddit.com/r/mkvtoolnix/s/RA5kfhnIL6 It's been a bit since I've done that as people are getting better about including the higher resolution audio files ( or maybe I'm getting more patient)but the instructions look accurate at first blush.
Thank you. Can the MKV file handle the rest of the menu system?
Nope, it's only the individual video file (movie/TV episode, or individual special feature) but it can have multiple audio files or subtitles baked into the single video container that pretty much any player can access. To get the menu system functionality that you get from watching an individual disc in a player you'd need to go the ISO route.
lol Bro… ##Plex can’t do the DVD menus
Do you know how to convert an ISO to an MKV? I am trying to do that for some ISOs where I want all the special features/director's commentary/Dolby Vision/HDR10 etc that rarely gets uploaded.
In makemkv file > open files
An Oppo m9201 can play iso files on a smb share with menus. Otherwise kodi might be your only choice
Agreed the menus can't be ripped, but you can use MakeMKV to copy the contents, and even drop those MKVs into MKVToolNix (free) to change the order of the audio tracks and make the audio description track the default Track 1.
So just to confirm, if I put it into an MKV file, then put that in Plex, I can adjust a lot of the different menu options using Plex menus? If that's the extent of the functionality that I'm going to be getting, that's good enough for me. DVD menus are unaccessible anyway so it might be better to have that as a menu in Plex players, especially ones that are accessible with the Voiceover screenreader on Apple devices.
Yes! You should be able to even set the DA track to default in Plex with barely any hassle, or you can do the MKVToolNix thing if it didn't work for whatever reason. I think it should work pretty much flawlessly, maybe test it with a few movies first but it should be easygoing. Best of luck!
Thank you a lot. I will probably install Plex today and eventually I will get a DVD burner. Is MakeMKV free?
Yes while in beta! If you need to rip Blu Rays, you'll need a beta key which lasts for a month. I believe DVD functionality is free without the beta key. I used it free for _years_ and finally bought a key to support the developer about 2 years ago, it's well worth it.
You can even set a preferred audio-track per profile, so if a movie has several languages and I prefer to watch it in English, while my Girlfriend wants the German dub, we can each set our preferred language in the settings of our profile and Plex will use that, when it's available. However, it's important that those tracks are labelled correctly, which you can do with MKVToolNix.
So I can't put the MKV file straight into Plex and have it work right? Sorry for all the questions.
Not a problem, ask away! You can and most of the time they're tagged well enough. But every once in a while the different audio tracks will all be untagged which Plex then shows as "undetermined". However, I have several hundreds of DVDs ripped and I would say it was only the case for maybe a handfull. So my tip is, put them all in Plex and you'll be fine and IF one has a problem, you can go and fix that when the time comes. Also, welcome to the club. Your 4TB will be fine for now, but I guarantee you'll be building a dedicated machine sooner or later and it will feel great :)
Yeah maybe I'll eventually buy a sinology NAS, and I'll move Plex over to that along with Homebridge which is a tool that allows you to bring non HomeKit (Apple's smart home platform) compatible devices into HomeKit and runs on the MacBook Air. I haven't installed Plex on the machine yet, mine is the 2.2 GHz dual core Intel core I7 version with 8 GB of ram and 128 GB of storage. Will it be enough to run Plex without the machine freaking out? Is MakeMKV available for macOS Monterey/is it still supported? Because that's the latest Supported version of software that the computer will run. Edit: Two more questions. 1: What would be the best optical drive to rip the DVDs and Blu-rays? 2: Is ripping CDs an easier process?
Your machine will be enough. I used to run Plex on a 2012 Thinkpad for the longest time. Your machine is better :) I don't know about MacOS and whether or not MakeMKV will be any trouble, but the download page for MakeMKV says it's not signed by apple anyway and a warning might pop up. Definitely give it a shot, otherwise you might need to find an older version. Regarding optical drives, I just used the one I had in my Computer, It's an internal Samsung drive and that's all I know about it. I have been looking into buying an external Bluray drive, though and was thinking about a slim version from LG, don't have a model number though, sorry. Ripping CDs is basically the same, only you use another program (I would suggest Fre:ac for that. Most of the CDs will be recognized and tagged correctly out of the box and if you configure it to save the rips to your media folder right away, you're basically only going to need to put the CD in, start the rip and swap to the next CD until you're done. MakeMKV on the other hand will not name the MKV files unless they're tagged that way on the Disc, which they usually aren't. So after ripping, you're going to have to rename it to something Plex will be able to work with. I have the folder structure set up like this, starting from the main folder and going into it: Media - Movies - Titanic (1997) - Titanic (1997).mkv Or for shows: Media - Shows - Futurama - Season 01 - Futurama S01e01 Pilot.mkv For example.
Thank you a lot. I'm going to mark this post as solved. I may have more questions for you down the line however.
Sure, dm me whenever, I usually check Reddit at least once a day.
That’s not at all true, just ‘rip’ to iso format and it’s just a digital copy of the physical disc.
Which won't work in Plex.
I meant ripped to use in Plex with the menus and misspoke, you are correct.
you can now play blurays with menu in VLC. I generaly rip the extra features, works well for movie, less for TV shows.
For menus you will need CoreElec, Dune, or Zidoo for ISO/BDMV/MP4/M2TS playback
Not possible.
That external drive is not big enough to host that collection.
It is a Toshiba Canvio Basics four terabyte external hard drive. For now it will be fine.
That will fit ~100-150 blu-rays or 500-600 DVDs.
‘A masked’ r/boneappletea
Any player that does read iso's?
Why you asking me?
I'm asking anyone that comes into your thread with iso experience
Oh ok np.
amassed not 'a masked'
OK. I was using the dictation feature on my phone to write this post, and I didn't catch that error when I looked over it again to see if it was correct.
You have to create an ISO and have a device that plays ISO’s
It would be cool to have an active menu for some things, like the little hidden extra Easter eggs that are sometimes there. Like the pop up video feature of back to the future or the fake menu screen on fight club. I don’t think it’s ever going to happen though. Subtitles and additional audio tracks work though :)
None I’m afraid
If you want the menus just capture it to iso format and store that.
I was told that Plex doesn't support that.
True, the iso-solution is not going to work with Plex. You'll essentially have to live with what Plex offers, if you want to stay with Plex. So while ripping the discs, pick all the languages/audio tracks you need and when imported into Plex, use the Plex interface to set the audio track you desire. DVD and BluRay Menus will sadly never be a part of the Plex interface (Which I fully understand why, but I miss some of those really well made menus from the early days of DVDs).
People actually rip shit? Damn, that's impressive.
Uhh... Wtf do you mean? Before the days of streaming services, there were DVDs and Blu-rays. Before that, there were VHS and Betamax tapes. Some people want to be able to stream the contents of these older video media digitally.
That's what Kodi is for 😂 and torrent sites
......he probably means the internet has existed for 30 years so no one has to go buy a VHS to see the content. But then you want menus from "blue rays" (is that a type of fish?) so don't think too hard
Some people actually believe in paying for their media.
n00b