Lately forced subtitles are not working.

[NEO Dan]

Anyone have trouble with subtitles lately? By default I grab all of the english subtitle tracks but lately I find my MKV's subtitles do not play back. Is there a way to verify the subtitle content, or the correct subtitle track to select? Normally I go back and manually identify the track, but lately there have been titles where all the saved tracks appear to be empty.

[Woodstock]

No issues here. If there were issues with subtitles, I'd be in trouble, because my Japanese just isn't that good!

What is telling you there are no subtitles?

[bobsegii]

I just ripped The Martian, and I also could not get the forced subtitles to show (playing in Kodi-Windows and Kodi-Android). I re-ripped it with the full English subtitles, and those played okay. So then I ripped a separate copy with forced English again and looked at them both in mkvmerge. The full English subtitle shows up as a track, but the mkv that's supposed to have the forced English subtitles shows no subtitle track at all. I don't know enough to determine if the issue is MakeMKV or if it's the disc. I'll try re-ripping a disc that I know my mkv has a working forced subtitle, and see if the new version of MakeMKV fails to create the subtitle track.

EDIT: I just noticed this in the MakeMKV log when I ripped The Martian with forced English selected: "Forced subtitles track #2 turned out to be empty and was removed from output file"

[Woodstock]

That means that there was no subtitle marked as "forced" within the subtitle track. Most likely there is a separate track that only has what would be considered "forced" subtitles, if there are any.

[bobsegii]

I didn't notice that The Martian had two English subtitle tracks. I was originally using the one that MakeMKV was showing at the top of the list, but there was another at the bottom. That one works. Make sure you're getting every English subtitle track, and then check the mkv file in mkvmerge. You should see a subtitle track (something like "HDMV PGS") with a default track flag set to "yes".

[drathbun]

Just went through this exactly same thing myself. I had figured it out, and once I figured it out, I was able to search with proper terms and find this topic. Lesson learned.

Every time I think I have my process down, a disc will throw a different twist into the mix...