Descriptive Narration

[Rexxwood]

What am I doing wrong?
When I rip my Blu-rays and play back from the hard drive they play with the descriptive narration on. If played on Windows Media Player no audio, on Plex the picture freezes about every 10 seconds

[Woodstock]

One of the selection rules built in to MakeMKV is to favor higher-resolution audio tracks. Sometimes, the descriptive audio (or commentary tracks) have "better specs" than the movie itself. I've seen movies with mono or stereo audio tracks have 5.1 Dolby for the "extras" tracks.

There are a few ways to deal with it.

If you are like me, and have MakeMKV rip ALL audio and subtitle tracks, you can use the header editor in mkvtoolnix to set the flags on the correct track. Which flag to set depends on your player; some obey the "default" flag, others obey the "forced" flag (MakeMKV does not normally set this). Ripping everything lets me use VLC to find out which tracks are the ones I want, and I only have to read the disk once.

You can also re-arrange the audio and subtitle track positions in the file if you re-encode the MKV with handbrake. This was my primary way to make players "work correctly", but some players are screwy about even that.