Ripping TV Season BD Discs - How to determine which episode is which?

I could swear this exact same question was posted a few weeks ago.

I rip my shows using MakeMKV. I always rip the MPLS. Not the M2TS. Sometimes I'll get lucky and the episodes will be in numerical order. For instance, if there's 4 episodes on a disc they'll appear as 7000, 7001, 7002, and 7003 in MakeMKV. Where it gets tricky, is when they're not in order.

What I like to do is play the first 1 or 2 seconds of each episode, using a Blu-ray player or TMT5. I then write down what appears on screen during those brief moments, and the episode length in minutes and seconds. I then rip all MPLS episodes on the discs that match up with the run times I had written down. I will play the first 1 or 2 seconds of each episode I ripped and compare what I wrote down and run times to figure out which episode is which.

It's a huge pain in the but to do. But it's the safest way for me to rip TV shows. In the past, I didn't know that some TV shows are out of order when you ripped them. And then found out the hard way by accidently watching an episode out of order.

There's still some risk of spoilers with watching those first 2 seconds of each episode, but I don't know of any safer way to do it.

Edit: I should add that most of the time, I can tell which episode is which by their run times. It's only when each episode is exactly the same length, that I have to rely on watching those first 2 seconds.

There are several ways to determine the episodes on the disc, but they all require that you play the disc. The most obvious would be to see the title displayed, but not that many programs display the actual title onscreen. Another is to check the closing credits for the episode number. You can get a complete listing of TV programs and their episode numbers at www.epguides.com. If you're archiving shows it's a great way to create a checklist to see which episodes you have and what you need.

Do tv shows always show the episode number in the credits? I wasn't aware, thats cool.

Show, season and episode information can be had along with metadata and artwork at www.thetvdb.com also.

True but it doesn't really help when trying to figure out the episodes on a disc. Unless of course you read the plot and watch the episodes enough to figure out which is which. But besides tasking forever that would totally spoil the show.

Great site though. I use it often when I need some info on a show.

TVrage is another popular one for episode listings.

You need season, episode and synopsis information right? If you are working on a single season you can get the basic information such as the entire season 7 of Weeds. I guess I'm not seeing the difference?

For movies, I usually google the movie name and mpls. A lot the the torrents include the mpls # in the title, so it helps me figure out which is the right one to rip. you could try this for the tv episode discs.

Its great for naming etc. My point was if ripping a tv show I do not want to figure out each episode by reading a synopsis, and then viewing the show to see if it matches up. If you have no idea what episode is which then to me it seems this would be the only method with TVDB. Or am I missing something. I understand if you are stuck this will work. But it seems like a last resort.

Guess there's trailers on epguides which might help a bit more. No trailers on thetvdb.

We should start a thread like the forced subs thread. And get a database going. Surprised there isn't one yet.

Great idea. So this can be it!!