freemkv

This is a community package of freemkv, maintained independently and unaffiliated with the freemkv project. It repackages the official upstream .deb unmodified and follows upstream releases automatically.

freemkv is an open-source backup tool for DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray discs. It reads the video and audio streams off the disc and writes them to MKV, MP4 or M2TS, or to an ISO image or folder, without re-encoding. The same binary is a desktop app and a command-line tool.

• Pick titles, audio and subtitle tracks, with language filters.
• Original quality: streams are copied, not re-encoded.
• Multi-pass reads that recover from unreadable sectors.
• Works from a drive, an ISO image or a disc folder already on disk.

DVDs need no setup. Blu-ray and UHD discs need an AACS key database (keydb.cfg) that you supply yourself; freemkv ships no keys. Import one from the app's settings, or run flatpak run org.freemkv.FreeMKV update-keys --url <keydb-url>. It is stored in the app's own config directory under ~/.var/app/org.freemkv.FreeMKV.

Permissions: this package grants access to all devices, because the optical drive is read with raw SCSI commands and Flatpak has no narrower permission for that; the GPU; network access, used only to download a key database from a URL you give it; and your Videos and Downloads folders as rip destinations. Other folders can be picked in the file chooser, or opened up with an override:

• Read and write anywhere in your home directory: flatpak override --user --filesystem=home org.freemkv.FreeMKV

The command-line tool is the same binary: flatpak run org.freemkv.FreeMKV info disc:// lists the titles on the disc in the drive, and flatpak run org.freemkv.FreeMKV disc:// mkv://$HOME/Videos/movie.mkv rips it. Make sure you are allowed to make a backup of a disc where you live before you do.