Ripping home movies to Plex

We had a tonne (yes that's metric) of old VHS tapes that I wanted to be able to play. I can't actually remember when I started, but I think it was over 10 years ago.

I purchased a DVD recorder, the Samsung DVD-R160. I wanted the ease of just pushing record on the DVD recorder and pushing play on the VHS machine. Worked out pretty good, I was able to transfer at least 100 tapes to DVD in a relatively short amount of time.

DVD? What's that?

Fast forward another 10 or so years and we don't have an active DVD player. I still have the Samsung hooked up downstairs but it's rare that we'd sit down and plop in old home movie DVDs and watch for hours.

Having a Plex server for my own library of movies, it only made too much sense to create a Plex library for home movies.

It's simple to rip, right?

I thought it should be fairly straightforward to rip those DVDs into Plex. After all I have become a fan of MakeMKV that easily rips a DVD to an MKV file that Plex can read without having to re-encode and lose a generation of quality.

However, MakeMKV started erroring out on multiple DVDs. I tried different drives (I have an LG BP60NB10 and a Samsung SE-506). I tried multiple times, I tried creating an image first, I tried different software, and nothing worked. Still got errors.

Track order matters

One method that almost worked was copying the raw VOB files from the DVD (which I could do because they aren't encrypted with copy protection) and attempting to convert to MKV.

I could convert the individual files but that broke up the videos as VOB files are limited to 1GB file size. Why not try and connect them together. This is where it starts to get complicated.

LosslessCut

This is a great piece of software. I've been looking for exactly these features for ages. Most times I don't want to re-edit and re-encode videos but instead just snip and clip here and there. LosslessCut fits the bill.

LosslessCut also has the ability to merge a number of video files together. I've also used the command line utility mkvmerge. Though I'm a programmer by day, command line utilities for things like modifying video files just seems like too much.

Won't merge, what's going on!?

LosslessCut can show some details of what is encoded in the files. Took a look at the first VOB and saw this:

Made sense. The video was the first track and the audio the second track. So I opened the next VOB and saw this:

Ok, it's starting to make sense. For some reason in this VOB the audio is the first track with the video as the second track.

I find this really odd considering this all came from the Samsung DVD recorder I previously mentioned. Why would it change the order of tracks while recording the same content?

I wanted to get a little more info so I opened up the VOB files from the same disk in mkvtoolnix-gui, another great tool for dealing with mkv files. This is what I saw:

Again, becoming more clear. For some reason the first and last VOB files had the video track first with the middle two listing the audio track first.

I don't know all the technical details, but apparently you can't merge those files unless the tracks match.

Now I'm confused

In the process of writing this blog it's taken me a couple sittings. In that time somehow I can't seem to reproduce the views I showed above. Even though LosslessCut still won't merge the files, when I open with mkvtoolnix-gui all the video tracks are ID 0 and the audios tracks 1.

I'm obviously going to spend more time with this so hopefully I can nail it down with a little more precision.