A harder question about DVD ripping is what is the best way to rip a library of episodic TV DVD. The biggest issue with DVD TV Series Boxsets is if you can rip DVD episodes to MKV or MP4 files that include all audio tracks and subtitles to play back using VLC in separately. It is no doubt that ripping each episode individually works the best, especially considering that most front ends have nice interfaces to manage TV shows. So what way is the best to rip individual TV episodes? Lets take a look at the most popular software out there that can be used to create individual episodes, with a focus on mkv and mp4 keeping multiple subtitle and audio tracks.
Pavtube ByteCopy
- Tools – ByteCopy
- Additional Resources – review
- Media Type: DVD, HD DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray
- Output File: multi-track MKV/MP4/MOV/AVI, 4K MP4/MKV, HD WMV/TS/FLV and more
- Decrypter Needed: No (ByteCopy has built-in decrypter)
- Encoding – Yes
- Retain Original Video/Audio: Yes
- Batch Mode: Yes
- Cost – Free while in Beta
- Comments: Pavtube ByteCopy is a pretty efficient piece of software that can create MKVs from Blu Ray/HD DVDs/SD DVDs with all subtitle and audio tracks in lossless video and audio quality. It is very easy to pick out the individual episodes versus other extras. There is no good way to determine which Title is which episode, so once the DVD TV sets are loaded, you need to check the title one by one. When it comes to ripping DVD TV sets, it also can convert DVD to MP4/MOV with multiple audio tracks and rip DVD to WMV, FLV, TS, WebM and more.
Ripping episodic DVD to multitrack (audio) MKV or MP4 files
Step 1: Add the DVD TV Series
Insert your DVD disc to the drive, then launch the DVD Ripper and click the “Load Disc” button to select and load the DVD TV Series to the app. This program will automatically choose the main title of the DVD TV Series disc. If you want to rip DVD to different episodes, you can tick each chapter instead of the whole DVD main title.
Step 2: Choose MKV or MP4 files
Choose MKV format as output, here “Format > Multi-track Video > Lossless/encoded Multi-track MKV (*.mkv)” is recomended for you. And the audio tracks, subtitles streams, and chapters preserved in the MKV container are available to select at will during playback. If you want MP4 format, you can choose multi-track MP4 as the output format.
Tip: There is a “Settings” option, which allows you to make adjustments on your audio, video, subtitles. It’s worth mentioning that, by default, all audio & subtitles tracks in a source file are checked to be saved in the MKV container, if there are some tracks you don’t like, you can click Settings button and go to Multi-task Settings window to uncheck and remove them under Audio tab and Subtitle tab.
Note: To do DVD to MKV conversion without re-encoding, don’t change audio parameters under “Encode” option, otherwise you will get a encoded multi-track MKV file, not lossless multi-track MKV and recoding DVD to MKV will take a little more time for conversion than lossless output.
Step 3: Start DVD to multitrack (audio) MKV or MP4
Click big “Convert” button to start DVD TV set to . Once finished, open the output folder, locate the generated MKV or MP4 file with multiple audio tracks.
Now, you can play the DVD TV sets using VLC in separate episodes.
