Overview

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freemkv is a Rust toolchain for optical-disc backup. Its goal is to recover 100% of readable data from any optical disc, automatically, then decrypt and mux the result to MKV.

“Readable” is the bound: if a sector can be read off the disc, freemkv reads it. Not best-effort: everything the drive can physically recover, pursued through transient errors and marginal media.

If you just want to rip a disc, the CLI reference has every command, run the autorip service and let it do it on disc insert, or open the desktop app — pick titles, press Rip.

The recovery model

Disc recovery runs in two phases:

• Pass 1, sweep. A sequential read of the whole disc, tolerant of bad sectors. When a sector won’t read, freemkv records the range and skips ahead instead of aborting, so one bad spot never costs you the rest of the disc.
• Pass N, patch. Targeted retries on the bad ranges from the sweep: multi-attempt, with a per-sector recovery timeout, cache priming, and bisection of unread ranges to find the good middle of a partly-damaged region.

Once the map is clean (or an accepted-loss threshold is reached), freemkv muxes: decrypt the disc and write the titles to MKV. See How recovery works for the full model.

Formats and decryption

Format	Encryption	Keys
DVD	CSS	None (keyless)
Blu-ray	AACS 1.0	Required
4K UHD	AACS 2.0 / 2.1	Required

DVDs decrypt with no setup. Blu-ray and 4K UHD need decryption keys you provide; see Decryption Keys. 4K UHD covers both AACS 2.0 and 2.1 discs, and both decrypt the same way — from the keys you supply, not from the disc’s variant data.

The toolchain

freemkv ships in three ways, all built on a shared core.

freemkv CLI: manual, scriptable control. Every input and output is a scheme:// stream URL:

# rip a disc to MKV — main title (the default)
freemkv disc:// mkv://Movie.mkv

# inspect a disc
freemkv info disc://

# remux an existing ISO to MKV — main title (the default)
freemkv iso://Disc.iso mkv://Movie.mkv

freemkv rips the main title by default (one file), for any source — disc:// or iso://. Add -t N to choose a specific title, or -t all to rip every title on the disc (one file each, to a directory); run freemkv info disc:// to list titles with durations.

Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. See the CLI reference.

freemkv desktop app: the same binary, opened as a window instead of run as a command — pick titles and tracks, choose an output format, and watch live progress. Available on macOS today, with a native Windows app in development; Linux stays CLI-only. See the macOS page.

autorip: a service (Windows, macOS, Linux) that watches your optical drives, runs the full pipeline on disc insert, and exposes a web UI. Insert a disc, get an MKV, repeat. See the autorip service.

All three compose libfreemkv, the core library that handles drive access, sector reads, AACS/CSS decryption, and MKV muxing, plus freemkv-engine, which layers recovery and the rip loop on top of it. See Components for the breakdown of every crate.

Next steps

• Install: prebuilt binaries or build from source.
• Platforms: per-OS setup, file locations, and drive access (Windows, macOS, Linux).
• CLI reference: every subcommand, flag, and stream URL.
• Decryption Keys: what Blu-ray and UHD need.