[RESOLVED] MakeMKV down? Alternatives?
//Edit: it's back, reason (expired DNS entries) in the comments.
I chose this community to post in since it seems the most likely userbase to know and use MakeMKV.
MakeMKV has stopped working for me (temp licence ran out), and when I tried to renew it, I noticed that the entire website seems to be down. Does anybody know anything about the project? Is this just temporary server issues or a permanent shutdown? And, seeing that such a vital piece of software can just go away at any moment, do you know any viable alternatives for ripping your legally owned DVDs? Of course, handbrake does exist, but it can't seem to properly sync up subtitles with the audio.
On Reddit it sounds like they think the dns expired and is coming back. Might take up to 72 hrs to propagate.
I see. Thank you for pointing that out!
I did some digging and, looking at their historical DNS records, got their IP: http://104.21.49.241/ . After all, they're probably not using DDNS, so it shouldn't have changed, and whatever is on the other side of that IP does ping. But accessing it directly via http(s) yields an error 1003. Apparently, this is Cloudflare's way of saying: "YOU! SHALL! NOT! BYPASS MY URL!"
Sooo I guess I'll just twiddle my thumbs and wait.
What if you set the IP for that domain in your hosts file?
I can confirm their site loads fine if you do that. Their forum is the same IP address so if you do the hosts file trick with forums.makemkv.com you can find this thread about the DNS expiry.
EDIT: I just looked makemkv.com up with whois and the domain expired yesterday... so that'd explain everything. Hopefully the real owner renews it before the grace period is over otherwise bad things are going to happen.
Wild! This does work! I just don't fully understand why it would, though. Does the modified hosts file cause my browser to send the correct headers to Cloudflare (i.e. a request to the expected domain, not the IP directly)?
For anyone coming here in need of an urgent Linux fix: This will modify your hosts file accordingly.
You may need to delete your browser cache or work around it via a Private Tab.
Thanks for your assistance in hacking past broken DNS records. This was fun! :)