Back up DVDs with MakeMKV (makemkvcon) and disable auto updates on Linux

In this short post I’m going to show you the basics of backing up a DVD with MakeMKV, and how to disable Auto Update for MakeMKV (makemkvcon).

Intro

I’m currently backing up some old DVDs (they age, degrade, and wont last forever). I haven’t got many computers in the house which have a DVD drive, and I mostly consume media via streaming services or my Plex instance.

I’ve got a Laptop running Ubuntu Server (hosting this blog), that does have a DVD Drive. It’s not ideal that I need to use this to backup DVDs while it’s running my blog, but needs must!

MakeMKV + Install

MakeMKV is a program which runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It converts a DVD and its different titles (videos) to .mkv files on your machine. I’m going to concentrate on Linux, as none of my working Windows PCs have a DVD drive.

You can download for Windows and Mac here or follow the below steps for a Linux install (I did initially try to install through Ubuntu Snap, however that gave permission errors about the drive, when I was in the correct groups - so I bailed on that route)

Add the repository and install the packages

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:heyarje/makemkv-beta

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install makemkv-bin makemkv-oss

Now run the following to check your installation

makemkvcon

You should see the below output

Use: makemkvcon [switches] Command [Parameters]

Commands:
  info <source>
      prints info about disc
  mkv <source> <title id> <destination folder>
      saves a single title to mkv file
  backup <source> <destination folder>
      backs up disc to a hard drive
  f <args>
      run universal firmware tool
  reg <key string or file name>
      enter registration key into program

Source specification:
  iso:<FileName>    - open iso image <FileName>
  file:<FolderName> - open files in folder <FolderName>
  disc:<DiscId>     - open disc with id <DiscId> (see list Command)
  dev:<DeviceName>  - open disc with OS device name <DeviceName>

Switches:
  -r --robot        - turn on "robot" mode, see http://www.makemkv.com/developers

Backing up a DVD

To backup an inserted DVD to a folder, use the following command:

makemkvcon mkv disc:0 all /home/ryan/dvd-backups/the-matrix

That will take a while, depending on the speed of your DVD drive. My laptop took about 25 mins to rip a DVD9.

This will spit out a bunch of .mkv files, each of which represents a separate video on the DVD.

Turn off Auto-Update

As MakeMKV is installed on my Web Server (again, not ideal), I don’t want it automatically checking for updates. It might hurt performance at random times, when it does the update check/install. And I’m not planning on using this too regularly, so I can always update it before I use it.

As we’re running makemkvcon through the CLI, there’s no GUI for us. So we’ll have to create (if it doesn’t already exist)/edit a settings file.

For my install, there was no existing settings file, so I created the file

touch ~/.MakeMKV/settings.conf

and then added the config line, to disable the auto-updates

echo 'app_UpdateEnable = "0"' >> ~/.MakeMKV/settings.conf

And that’s it!

Hopefully you’ve found this slightly useful, this is mainly going to serve as a reference for me as I struggled to find a good result on Google which explained all parts above in one place.