mattjackson
22nd June 2026, 05:27
Latest Version 1.0 rc1 - Jun 21st 2026
What freemkv is
freemkv is a fully open source, multi operating system, command line tool that rips and remuxes optical media into standard MKV.
- freemkv-cli - a CLI for one-shot work: freemkv disc:// mkv://Movie.mkv.
- autorip - a service with a web UI that watches your drive, and the moment you drop a disc in, identifies it, rips it, recovers bad sectors, and muxes it hands-free.
Both are the same engine. Both are a single binary you can download and run.
The headlines for 1.0
- DVD works the way it always should have. freemkv decrypts CSS protected DVDs without a player-key database, the key is recovered directly from the disc. Rip, mux, and play, out of the box, nothing to install or download. We rebuilt the MPEG-2 program-stream muxer from the ground up so a ripped DVD decodes clean end to end, with correct timestamps and A/V sync.
- Blu-ray and 4K UHD are supported through the standard AACS key flow (supports RESTful Online Key Servers or Offline keydb.cfg). Online Key Servers are new - but in principle you just get the key you need for your disc automatically, it "just works". Info coming soon.
- Recover 100% of what's readable. Scratched, marginal, or aging media hasn't been an issue so far, I worked hard on making sure discs were recoverable at all cost. freemkv does a tolerant full-disc sweep, then targeted multi-pass recovery on the bad ranges, per-sector retry budgets, cache priming, range bisection, pursuing every sector the drive can physically return. You set the tolerance: require a perfect rip, or accept a defined amount of loss before giving up.
- It's fast. The mux pipeline is a threaded read→decrypt→demux→codec highway that moves data at hundreds of MB/s on warm cache.
- MKV track labels done right. Audio and subtitle tracks come out clearly named, so your library is browsable instead of a wall of "Track 3 (eng)".
A note on this being a release candidate
This is rc.1. The core paths, DVD/BD/UHD rip, recovery, and mux, are working and tested. This has been 6+ months in development but we still want more real discs in real drives before we call it 1.0. If something doesn't rip or doesn't play, we want to hear it. freemkv ships with verbose, opt-in debug logging precisely so a bug report is actionable:
run the CLI with --log-level 3 --log-file PATH (or flip the Debug toggle in autorip) and attach the log.
https://freemkv.org/
Looking forward to feedback and comments!
What freemkv is
freemkv is a fully open source, multi operating system, command line tool that rips and remuxes optical media into standard MKV.
- freemkv-cli - a CLI for one-shot work: freemkv disc:// mkv://Movie.mkv.
- autorip - a service with a web UI that watches your drive, and the moment you drop a disc in, identifies it, rips it, recovers bad sectors, and muxes it hands-free.
Both are the same engine. Both are a single binary you can download and run.
The headlines for 1.0
- DVD works the way it always should have. freemkv decrypts CSS protected DVDs without a player-key database, the key is recovered directly from the disc. Rip, mux, and play, out of the box, nothing to install or download. We rebuilt the MPEG-2 program-stream muxer from the ground up so a ripped DVD decodes clean end to end, with correct timestamps and A/V sync.
- Blu-ray and 4K UHD are supported through the standard AACS key flow (supports RESTful Online Key Servers or Offline keydb.cfg). Online Key Servers are new - but in principle you just get the key you need for your disc automatically, it "just works". Info coming soon.
- Recover 100% of what's readable. Scratched, marginal, or aging media hasn't been an issue so far, I worked hard on making sure discs were recoverable at all cost. freemkv does a tolerant full-disc sweep, then targeted multi-pass recovery on the bad ranges, per-sector retry budgets, cache priming, range bisection, pursuing every sector the drive can physically return. You set the tolerance: require a perfect rip, or accept a defined amount of loss before giving up.
- It's fast. The mux pipeline is a threaded read→decrypt→demux→codec highway that moves data at hundreds of MB/s on warm cache.
- MKV track labels done right. Audio and subtitle tracks come out clearly named, so your library is browsable instead of a wall of "Track 3 (eng)".
A note on this being a release candidate
This is rc.1. The core paths, DVD/BD/UHD rip, recovery, and mux, are working and tested. This has been 6+ months in development but we still want more real discs in real drives before we call it 1.0. If something doesn't rip or doesn't play, we want to hear it. freemkv ships with verbose, opt-in debug logging precisely so a bug report is actionable:
run the CLI with --log-level 3 --log-file PATH (or flip the Debug toggle in autorip) and attach the log.
https://freemkv.org/
Looking forward to feedback and comments!