Questions about ISOs

General
1

I’ve been happily using Makemkv to prodcue .mkvs of my DVDs and BDs. Having ripped my collection (500+ films) before ISO support was launched by appetite to redo them all as ISOs has been, ummm, limited…

However, as I acquire more films I’m wondering whether to switch to using .ISOs going forwards. I could do with a little bit of help/insight before jumping though:

  1. Are there any must dos/must not dos when ripping to a .ISO vs a .mkv?

  2. Organisation on the NAS: currently I put each film in its own folder and the folder name is that of the film. Same routine with .ISOs?

  3. The biggie: does ripping a .ISO give me the film and all the extras, loading as if I had the physical media in a BD player? Currently I make a .mkv of the film only and ditch the extras. The latest film to arrive is the Lego Batman Movie, hence why I am wondering whether it might be worth doing something to pull off the extras too.

  4. Any difference in the way .isos are presented in the UI compared to how .mkvs are presented?

TIA

2

  1. There’s nothing too crazy to worry about. Aside from a few cases we’re looking into with 3D based films, ISOs in Infuse just work.

  2. This will work just fine.

  3. Yes all content will be available to play in Infuse. The one asterisk here is DVD/Blu-ray menus won’t be available. Infuse will auto-play the main title, and you can jump through the various other titles through the Video section of the playback menu (swipe down while a video is playing). We have a few ideas for improving this for the future as well.

  4. ISOs will appear just like regular MKVs with full cover art and metadata.

Hope this helps. :slight_smile:

3

Cool - thanks, James. My appetite is whetted.

If I end up deciding that I like it so much I re-rip a bunch of BDs though, I’ll know who to blame…!

4

Hmm. Ok - limited success. I used WinISO to create the .iso. fine.

The film appeared with artwork fine on both Apple TV4 and my ipad. The movie ticket graphic and text took a little longer to load than normal. But trying to play it on the ipad and ATV resulted in it hanging and not starting.

If I had to guess, I’d say there’s an issue with copy protection on the disc which remains present in the .iso. But that really is complete guesswork.

5

Correct. Infuse is only able to play unencrypted content. You may try using something like DVDfab to create your ISOs.

6

Ok, one copy of DVDfab later and I’m in business. Kind of cool, but also a little frustrating because the list of untitled videos self evidently isn’t as user friendly as BD menus. Is that (getting BD menus in Infuse) a realistic goal at some point?

7

It’s not entirely clear if it’s possible, but we have a few ideas we’ll be looking into. Stay tuned. :wink:

8

Next piece of my “rolling review” of ISOs vs mkvs.

ISOs obviously give you everything on the disc, including the extras (but not - yet - the menus). So far two wrinkles in this though.

First: Infuse picks the longest file to play. Fine. That usually works. But sometimes not. Eg: Rogue One (or The Force Awakens, can’t recall) started up with the iconic “Long long ago…” in French. Go to videos and there are three tracks, with equally longest timings. Infuse by default picks the French language one. Dunno why. Another poster reported that the longest track on Gravity is a collection of extras.

Secondly: if you want an ISO to get the extras, you realise pretty rapidly that lots of discs have the film on disc 1 and the extras on disc 2. I don’t know (because I didn’t try to find out) how themoviedb.org would deal with an ISO of a disc 2 loaded with extras, if at all.

9

Thanks for the feedback. There are definitely some areas we’re hoping to improve with regard to ISO handling, and I’ll make I add your feedback to the list of things we’re hoping to look into for a future version.