Multiple similar versions of a piece of a media without excess disk usage

[RankoKohime 0]

I have a rather complex idea roiling around in my head, and hopefully someone can help with this.

On the Blu-Ray set of I Love Lucy Season 1, they have 2-3 versions of the same episode:

• The episode only, with intro and outro
• The episode as it was originally aired: with all sponsor spots
• The episode as it was rerun: with a short filler leading to the episode as a flashback sequence.

I would like to maintain those 3 versions, if possible.

Upon ripping, the rip is significantly larger than the capacity of the disk, simply due to the mechanism by which these versions are stored: the title is merely a playlist that references the video files, and the meat of the episode is only stored once and referenced by the titles of the 3 versions, but upon ripping with MakeMKV, it stores it as 3 separate files because MakeMKV doesn't have a way of linking this way.

I'm aware I could simply store the 3 separate files, and those versions would show up as a drop-down in Emby.  That, however would involve storing duplicate copies of the meat of the episode, which is not desirable.  I have played with MKVToolNix to do simple editing of blank areas or other undesirable content, and I'm aware the MKV container supports multiple video streams.  What I'm wondering is, if I can replicate the way the Blu-Ray handles the video, and have the multiple versions in a single file, that Emby would be aware of, OR, alternatively, store the parts as separate video files, and have Emby see playlists of these separate files as the actual episode versions.

And to be precise, I'm using Handbrake to reduce the file sizes in any situation, so that isn't a part of my concern.

Hopefully I've made this idea clear enough to be understood. 

Edited March 14, 2021 by RankoKohime

[mrfragger 39]

I don’t know a way but this reminds me of like 15 years ago or so. People wanted to watch no cuss or sex scenes so a few companies bought the original dvd then rented out an edited version. Believe the case made it or the Supreme Court and they got shutdown as it violated the editor’s or director’s artistic intent. 
 

There was one company that survived however which sounds like something you have in mind but no idea how one would go about it. They sold custom DVD players with a list of movies. You’d download onto a usb every couple of weeks a huge list of filters. Put in your rented Netflix dvd and that filter would skip sex scenes and mute cuss words. 
 

the filters were nothing more than embedded timecodes telling the DVD player to mute and skip certain parts of the movie. 
 

anyway I think you wanna skip parts of the original movie. Still no idea how you’d implement this. 
 

I played yesterday with mp4-tool to detect silence to auto generate chapters for audiobooks without marked chapters. Gave up with memory errors. Found out audacity does it perfectly with analyze / silence detection. 

[Luke 42077]

You might be able to get creative with .strm files but for the best possible experience I would suggest three separate complete videos, despite the space requirements.

[rbjtech 5284]

Seemless branching is 'possible' in MKV, but it needs a lot of fiddling - see the makemkv forums where somebody has it working ...

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=897

the how to is here ... jump to the bit about ordered chapters as that is I think what you are after ...

http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=8

Editor for it here -

https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=169984

 

Edited March 19, 2021 by rbjtech

[RankoKohime 0]

Thank you both for the suggestions.  I don't have anything working just yet, but I have a few notes if anyone stumbles on this thread while Googling.

My first thought was to have the chapters as discrete files (since the parts appear to be divided on chapter lines), but this I couldn't get to work right.

.strm files do not (appear) to support multiple links.  It simply plays the first file and then quits.  Same when it points at a .m3u file, it just plays the first file.