Embed forced subtitles

[Chetwood]

I would move ID4 one up to ID3, keep the settings on it and set all other sub flags to no.

[pcolmer]

I would move ID4 one up to ID3, keep the settings on it and set all other sub flags to no.

For my education, would you mind explaining why?

Many thanks.

Philip

[mew1033]

I hate dealing with subtitles... But, I've found a method that seems to work for me. When I get a new movie to rip, I first usually check one of these google doc pages.

1. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
2. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... YlE#gid=20

(the second one is free for anyone to edit, so it's usually kept more up to date. Albeit, messier)

If my movie does indeed have foreign language subs that aren't hardcoded/burned-in, I'll extract them with makemkv. I just look at that doc to see which tracks have what I want. My goal is to end up with two tracks, one with all subs EXCEPT forced, and one with just forced. This is getting more and more difficult lately...

Once I have my sub tracks like I want, I'll send the movie through handbrake and burn in the forced subs. There is no reason (that I can think of) I would ever NOT want the forced subs. And sometimes I want the rest of the subs as well.

Unfortunately, I often end up with a track that has everything INCLUDING the forced subs, and a track with just the forced subs.
This is where my particular method gets a little complicated.
If I find I don't have the correct subs, I'll usually end up downloading an .srt file that has all the subs in it for the movie I'm ripping. Then I'll go through and manually delete the subs that are also in the forced track. I end up with an .srt file with all english subs EXCEPT for the forced, and a PGS/.sup file with the forced parts. I'll use handbrake to burn in the PGS/.sup subs and add the modified .srt as the only track.


If I'm going at a good clip, I can usually get a movie done in 10-15 minutes, minus processing time.

[Chetwood]

Because the forced subtitle should always be muxed as the first track for standalones that don't read the flags.

[twofifty6]

Ok I'm new to this whole process of forcing in the subtitles, so can someone please help me with my steps below? Here is what I *THINK* I need to do. I'm trying to rip Star Wars Ep4 (A New Hope) at the moment. I want subtitles OFF throughout the movie, except for when Greedo and Jabba speak. I obviously want the subtitles forced in that point. Once I do all of this, I'm going to transcode with Handbrake and throw the final file into my Plex collection. I don't want Subtitles for the entire movie -- I can already understand all of the English dialogue. I just want the English subtitles for the alien dialogue, and I don't want to have to selectively enable and disable subtitles tracks through the movie. I'm performing the rip and transcode on Ubuntu 15.04, just FYI.

1. Set preferred language in MakeMKV to English (this way it will only select the English subtitle tracks).
2. Open the disk in MakeMKV (Or am I supposed to "backup" the entire BDROM to my hard drive, and if so do I decrypt it in the process???)
3. Leave *ALL* of the subtitle tracks and the forced tracks under them checked (Is this step correct???)
4. Click the button to actually create the MKV file
5. Now I have to somehow find the correct subtitle track (How???). Looking at the above spreadsheets I see "English subtitle track 6 (test chapter 22)" and "3 forced sub tracks, 11 is the movie. Subs are really high from the bottom. Alien dialog is 2 (Eng)." so I have no idea which track I'm supposed to use. The spreadsheets seem to disagree. Is there some software I use to analyze each subtitle track? Do I have to open it in a hex editor or what?
6. Now that I know which track is the correct subtitle track, I have to somehow convert it to an IDX or SRT file (How???)
7. Armed with the MKV file created in step 4 and my IDX/SRT file from step 6, I launch Handbrake and transcode it with some option that merges in the subtitle into the resulting file. I see a tab for Subtitles in Handbrake so I can probably figure this much out.


I have seen all sorts of other tutorials talking about ClownBD, MkvToolnix, BDSup2Sub, and so on. Do I need any of these tools or are the above steps correct? This is all so terribly confusing.

[ndjamena]

Because the forced subtitle should always be muxed as the first track for standalones that don't read the flags.

Do you have any evidence that that is the intended purpose of the "play first subtitle" feature, or are you just abusing a feature designed to show subtitles when hearing the audio is a problem to show forced subtitles instead?

(I've actually used it for the former purpose and don't think I'd actually like the idea of sacrificing that function for the purpose of the later.)

[Chetwood]

Do you have any evidence that that is the intended purpose of the "play first subtitle" feature, or are you just abusing a feature designed to show subtitles when hearing the audio is a problem to show forced subtitles instead?

I wasn't aware I needed evidence for anything I'm doing when ripping my BDs, nor that it would constitue an abuse rather than a workaround. That said, since most standalones ignore the flags, having the forced sub muxed as the first track prevents having to switch off the sub with your standalone default being set to ON. I'm not going so far as some ripping guides, suggesting to add a 1 item blank sub as the first stream to all rips that don't have forced subs so as to being able to keep the standalone subtitle set to default to ON without any intervention from the user.

[ndjamena]

"Should always" is a strong statement. It implies some directive is being referenced.

The current state of forced subtitles is a problem, but whether or not to sacrifice one subtitle feature to enable another until that changes is a matter of personal preference.

(I'm hoping be able to afford to replace my WDTV Live with a HTPC sometime within the next decade or so and it looks as though Kodi can read the flag.)

[Chetwood]

Any HTPC with MPC-HC can do it already.

[ndjamena]

Yes, and so can a HTPC with Kodi...


???

[ldoodle]

Any HTPC with MPC-HC can do it already.

I'm glad someone mentioned this. This is what I'm experiencing:

-> Play a full folder rip (VIDEO_TS, LotR - The Two Towers Disc 2 DVD for example) in VLC and you get no 'forced' subs. Turn on subs and you get the whole sub track, even for English language dialogue.
-> Play the same rip in MPC-HC and with subtitles off, you get the foreign dialogue only, perfectly. Turn on subs and you get the whole sub track including English language dialogue

VLC lists 5 sub tracks for this rip, MPC-HC lists only 1. Loading the rip in MakeMKV also only lists one sub track:

http://i.imgur.com/2XPStoR.jpg

So I rip it as per the screenshot and play the resulting MKV in either VLC or MPC-HC and you get no subs, at all, with subs off, not even the foreign dialogue. Turn on subs in either and you get the whole sub track, even English dialogue.

So MPC-HC honours the 'forced' flag for a full folder rip, but not an MKV? And VLC doesn't honour the 'forced' flag for either a full folder rip or MKV.

Interestingly, if I open LotR - FotR in SubRip I actually see 2 sub tracks; one is full, the other is foreign parts only. SubRip also reports only 1 sub track for LotR - TTT, and it's the whole sub track.

If I flag the only sub track listed in MakeMKV as 'f' for 'forced', VLC plays the whole track and MPC-HC plays nothing at all.

This is a really sad state of affairs. It shouldn't be this hard!

[Chetwood]

So MPC-HC honours the 'forced' flag for a full folder rip, but not an MKV? And VLC doesn't honour the 'forced' flag for either a full folder rip or MKV.

That's not my experience. I've ripped a chapter from Avatar which has one track with the Navi items flagged as forced. Using MKVToolnix I set both default and forced to NO. MPC-HC does show the forced items only, VLC does not. When I flag the track default yes or forced yes, VLC will automatically show the full track.

[ndjamena]

I think what he was trying to say was that his DVD has subtitles with DVD forced subtitle flags on elements in the track, which neither MakeMKV nor VLC support yet (and neither should any Matroska player).

VLC shows 5 subtitle tracks because it's listing the four possible DVD Closed Caption tracks as well (CC1, CC2, CC3 and CC4), which may or may not be there in reality.

Apparently MPC-HC obeys DVD forced flags if played from a proper DVD folder structure, which is nice to know.