If you’re extra cautious with your investments like I am and want to make sure your Blu-Ray discs are backed up just in case, you need MakeMKV. It’s a piece of software that makes it possible to back up Blu-Ray discs. Using it in conjunction with Handbrake is the perfect solution for backing up Blu-Ray discs. But MakeMKV doesn’t come as a simple to install .deb file for Debian/Ubuntu derivatives of Linux. Instead, you have to compile it. It’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing, but I got tired of figuring it out each time I reformatted my computer and had to reinstall MakeMKV. So, here are some easy to follow instructions.
(1) Download the tar.gz files. There are two of them. Once you’ve downloaded them, untar them to a location where you can access them (e.g., your home folder or the desktop).
(2) Make you sure you install the required packages to compile a program from source. You can do this from the terminal using the commands below or from a package manager like Muon or Synaptic:
sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config libc6-dev libssl-dev libexpat1-dev libavcodec-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libqt4-dev
(3) From the terminal, navigate to the directory where you untarred the file named makemkv-bin-1.8.9.tar.gz (e.g., /home/USER/Desktop/makemkv-bin-1.8.9/). Once in that directory, enter the following at the terminal:
make
(4) Then:
sudo make install
(5) This will go pretty quickly for the makemkv-bin-1.8.9.tar.gz files. Now for the oss file (i.e., makemkv-oss.1.8.9.tar.gz). This will take a bit longer. First, navigate to the folder where you untarred the files. Then type this in the terminal:
./configure
Then this:
make
Then this:
sudo make install
(6) Assuming everything completes, you’ll be back at the command prompt. The program should install itself in the list of programs (under multimedia). To launch it, click on the icon in the Kickoff Application Launcher.
(7) If you haven’t purchased the program, it will expire after 30 days. You should purchase the program. It’s pretty slick.
NOTE: Some Blu-Ray movies are so big that they come on two separate Blu-Ray discs (e.g., The Lord of the Rings triology). For combining MKV files, try mkvtoolnix: http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/downloads.html
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