DVD

Create ISO of DVD (“Backup” mode)

Extract ISO

This procedure will create an ISO, a direct copy of the whole disk. That ISO can then be burned to a blank disk or used for further access by other programs when opened/mounted in Windows Explorer. -Open MakeMKV -Click Backup icon (or File>Backup…) MakeMKV will make a bit-for-bit copy of the disk in “ISO” format ie disk-image format. The ISO can be played/checked with VLC Player: right click and choose Open with VLC Player or simply Double Click on it. If you want to analyse the contents of the ISO, RC on the ISO file and choose Open with > Windows Explorer. A virtual DVD drive will appear in the File Explorer left pane and the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders in the right hand pane. You can also extract the main movie (the group of large VOBs). For a Bluray, go into the BDMV>Stream folder; the main movie is the large m2ts file.

Burn your ISO with IMGBurn

-To burn a disk copy, open Imgburn -On the Ezimode Picker screen (Tools>Ezimode Picker) click on Write Image file to disk: This window will appear: 1.For Source (at the top of the window), browse to and select the ISO. 2.Insert a blank DVD (needs to be Dual Layer if ISO size is > 4.7GB) and check the Destination drive shown is the correct drive. 3.Set the Write speed to x4 for a single-layer DVD or x2 for a dual-layer DVD (my preference for accurate burning). 4.Click the file-to-disk icon at bottom left (large blue left-to-right arrow). For a dual-layer DVD, a list of layer-break points will be shown: click the best position (in this case, there’s only one, LBA 1913888, a yellow star; best is green, as shown in the Legend) then click OK: Imgburn will proceed with the burn and verification, if chosen. The disk drawer may open and close again during this process.

Extract Main Movie Only - Open Disc Mode

Use the Open Disc mode to analyse the video files on the disk and choose which ones you want to save to MKV. Insert your DVD File>Open Disc… A window similar to this will appear: This is a personal DVD with one title on it. Other DVDs may have numerous titles, but the main movie will easily be identified by it’s large size. Deselect all the titles you don’t want converted ie blue-tick only the movie you want to keep. Set the Output folder Click MakeMKV MakeMKV will extract your selected movies. While the file extension is MKV, the video and audio codecs will be of the files on the disk. In the example above, you can see the video codec is MPEG2 and the audio MP2. The MKVs can be “converted” with programs such as AVIDemux (in Copy Copy mode), which only changes the container/extension and doesn’t recode the file. Handbrake does recode all files and should be avoided for a simple extension change.

BluRay

ISO (“Backup” mode)

MakeMKV will not create an ISO; it will extract the two bluray folders though. These can then be grouped into an ISO using IMGBurn. These are the Bluray folders shown in the IMGBurn Write ISO window: To create an ISO from the 2 Bluray folders (BDMV and CERTIFICATE ), open IMGBurn, go to the Ezimode picker (Tools>Ezimode Picker) and choose “Create image file from Files/Folders”. Select the two folders and then hit the big blue- arrow button at the bottom.

Burning your Bluray ISO with IMGBurn

Use the same procedure as above for burning your ISO but make sure you set the Options to UDF 2.5:

Movie Files (“Open Disc” mode)

You can view the movies on the disk by opening the BDMV>Stream folder from the above process or use Open Disc mode, as per the DVD procedure above, to extract only the main movie in MKV. When you use Open Disc mode, this is the display: In this case, there are various titles on the disk, but the main movie is the 38.4GB title/file. Untick the titles you don’t want to keep then click MakeMKV.