I'm an eBay-and-Plex based digital media hoarder, and I recently upgraded my gear to include an external Blu-Ray player (the LG BP60NB10 as recommended by the MakeMKV forums). After a firmware flash, this device - via ARM - has happily tore through my small collection. Frustratingly, however, disc 1 of Community Season 1 kept failing after the backup stage and before it could start transcoding. The disc plays fine both via the external drive itself and in the Sony hooked up to my TV (no, ball-knowers, I did not purchase it so my boycott holds) so what gives? While unfortunately it took me two days of on-and-off detective work to figure it out, fortunately as I type this the rest of disc 1 is streaming onto my hard drive.
The first thing I had to do to troubleshoot was get Blu-Ray playback working under Linux in the first place. There are other guides for this, but the most common one currently at the top of your favorite search engine probably has an error at the end, where you symlink a library provided by MakeMKV into somewhere VLC can find it:
sudo ln -s libmmbd.so.0 /usr/lib/Beg pardon? Symlink what exactly? Nowhere else on the guide does it have you in a specific working directory, so this command wouldn't do anything. Never mind, since my particular Ubuntu spin and Linux Mint are both Debian-based, their forums came to my rescue and we find:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmmbd.so.0 /usr/lib/That makes much more sense. So, now VLC can play back the disc, and I can verify that each episode starts fine. So I make a list and start exploring my options for headless ripping, preferably in batches. However, once again I am stymied - I keep getting bizarre syntax errors in my VLC CLI commands! Surely there couldn't be syntax errors, here on God's internet? Reader, I regret to inform you...
I figured it out eventually. In the process, I noticed something interesting - sometimes VLC listed 30-odd Titles on the disc, but sometimes it listed 40-odd! I have no idea why or what changes this, I suspect there is at least a little corruption going on, but this is precisely why you need to archive the media that you own! So, having located two versions of each episode's location (that I hadn't already ripped completely by hand in the VLC GUI as part of troubleshooting), I give you this awful thing:
vlc -I dummy -vvv bluray:///dev/sr0#10 --no-bluray-menu --disc-caching=300 --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file{no-overwrite},mux=mp4,dst=Community.S01E04.mkv}' vlc://quit && vlc -I dummy -vvv bluray:///dev/sr0#11 --no-bluray-menu --disc-caching=300 --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file{no-overwrite},mux=mp4,dst=Community.S01E05.mkv}' vlc://quit && vlc -I dummy -vvv bluray:///dev/sr0#12 --no-bluray-menu --disc-caching=300 --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file{no-overwrite},mux=mp4,dst=Community.S01E06.mkv}' vlc://quit && vlc -I dummy -vvv bluray:///dev/sr0#13 --no-bluray-menu --disc-caching=300 --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file{no-overwrite},mux=mp4,dst=Community.S01E07.mkv}' vlc://quit && vlc -I dummy -vvv bluray:///dev/sr0#14 --no-bluray-menu --disc-caching=300 --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file{no-overwrite},mux=mp4,dst=Community.S01E08.mkv}' vlc://quit && vlc -I dummy -vvv bluray:///dev/sr0#15 --no-bluray-menu --disc-caching=300 --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file{no-overwrite},mux=mp4,dst=Community.S01E09.mkv}' vlc://quit && vlc -I dummy -vvv bluray:///dev/sr0#16 --no-bluray-menu --disc-caching=300 --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file{no-overwrite},mux=mp4,dst=Community.S01E10.mkv}' vlc://quit && vlc -I dummy -vvv bluray:///dev/sr0#17 --no-bluray-menu --disc-caching=300 --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file{no-overwrite},mux=mp4,dst=Community.S01E11.mkv}' vlc://quit && vlc -I dummy -vvv bluray:///dev/sr0#18 --no-bluray-menu --disc-caching=300 --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file{no-overwrite},mux=mp4,dst=Community.S01E12.mkv}' vlc://quit && vlc -I dummy -vvv bluray:///dev/sr0#19 --no-bluray-menu --disc-caching=300 --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file{no-overwrite},mux=mp4,dst=Community.S01E13.mkv}' vlc://quitGross, but effective. Don't listen to me too carefully about those bitrate choices - it will vary quite a bit depending on what you're ripping and those may or may not end up being my final values, but you can tweak from there.
