Missing Foreign Subtitles

[rkariff]

Hello.

I am trying to rip Salt. If you didn't know there is Russian and I'm presuming Korean (as that's where the location at the beginning of the movie is set).

I can rip it just fine. I use the English subtitles and all I get is the English, without any Russian or Korean. The DVD has 4 main sections that could possibly be the right movie, but so far I've had no luck. I deduced that they were the correct Titles because of their size and number of chapters, as they have 26-28 chapters, respectively.

I'm not a fan of separate subtitle files (SRT is the file extension if I remember correctly). I'd rather just keep it as one MKV file.

[Beck38]

On the original disc, there 'should' be a PGC subtitle track with English translations of that non-english speech, and you may then be able to make that track 'forced'. But I've seen lots of discs that don't do that, and you may, if you want those sections of the movie to have English translations, have to take the main English subtitle track, convert to srt, running through an OCR program, edit it, and then using MKVmerge to mux both it and the rest of the subtitles and video. 'Fun'. Don't know how much MakeMKV can automate any of that for you.

You may also find that someone has done that work for you, search subscene or other sub sites, and there may be an english track of non-english parts. The SD DVD may have it, or a disc in another region may have it as well (just not your region, like RegA).

I've done that on several discs in the past, sometimes I find the subs someone has already done the work on, and the only thing I needed to do is the work with MKVmerge and some time aligning to get the subs to 'play' at the time they should, and of course, make them 'forced'.

Again, tons of 'fun' if you want to do the work; maybe the non-english subs are right in front of you on that movie, you just need to play the actual disc and see, or sift through the subs of your rip. Or not.

What really kills me is a movie where the disc (DVD or Bluray) has no subtitles of those non-english parts, but I watch the flick on TV (cable/sat/streaming) and it DOES have those subtitles. Go figure.

[Woodstock]

If you have set a language preference in MakeMKV, it MAY be dropping the language tracks (audio and subtitle) that don't match, depending upon your default selection rule.... which you won't know about unless you've turned on the Advanced menu by checking "Expert mode" in Preferences->General.

After you open a disk and you have the selection menu up, next to each title in the left window pane is a small triangle. Click on it, and it will show you all the tracks within that title, including the subtitles. Are they all selected?

[rkariff]

If you have set a language preference in MakeMKV, it MAY be dropping the language tracks (audio and subtitle) that don't match, depending upon your default selection rule.... which you won't know about unless you've turned on the Advanced menu by checking "Expert mode" in Preferences->General.

After you open a disk and you have the selection menu up, next to each title in the left window pane is a small triangle. Click on it, and it will show you all the tracks within that title, including the subtitles. Are they all selected?

Yes. Also, each of the Titles has multiple English Subtitle tracks. One of which is the Director's Comments. So there are two others. One of the two says in the Track Information Pane: MKV Flags: Default. I was thinking that this is the default track if you turn on subtitles while watching. Just a thought.

Any other ideas?

[Woodstock]

Lots of ideas on subtitles. Number 1 is that you can't make blanket statements about subtitles.

95% or more of what I rip is Japanese. Subtitles are important. And here are the usual things I see, exclusive of commentary subtitles:

Disks that are dubbed:
Two subtitle tracks - one has everything, the other has just "signs and writing", also called "forced". Which one is which varies with the title. Whether or not one is flagged as "default" varies with the title.

One subtitle track that has everything. You either have subtitles, or you don't, so you can't read signs unless you have all subtitles. Viz Media frequently goes this way.

OCCASIONALLY (as in I only have one example of this, Avatar) one subtitle track that has everything, but some subtitles have a "forced" flag, and some players can take advantage of this. This is what the "forced only" option in MakeMKV is geared towards, so that these flagged subtitles can be put in a separate track, for players that don't understand/use the "forced" flag.

Disks that are subtitled only:
Well, of course there would just be one track, because everything gets subtitles. But I've seen disks with as many as 3, with translation notes added to one of them.

[rkariff]

How does one find the correct subtitle, given all the options that have been given?

[Woodstock]

The way I do it is to have MakeMKV rip ALL subtitles, then use VLC to play the MKV. Different subtitle tracks are selected to find the one that is "forced only", and the one that has everything.

I use that information for the next step - everything I rip goes through handbrake before going on the media server. I tell handbrake to put things in the "correct order". You can do the same thing with mkvmerge from mkvtoolnix, if you don't want to compress the video. I do, because animation can compress 50-90% from the original BD.

[rkariff]

So I sort of did what you did and didn't rip the subtitles.

I opened the DVD up in VLC. And then I viewed the subtitles as the movie was playing. Now I've seen this movie several times, so I know the parts that have foreign language. And so I skip to those sections and try out the English subtitles.

There were 3 English subtitles, 1 French subtitle, and 1 Spanish subtitle. So I could obviously rule out the French and Spanish, as they are no use to me. This leaves me with the 3 English. One of these, as it turns out, is Director's Commentary.

So I'm down to 2 English subtitles. They work, but not how I expected. They show both English subtitles and Russian subtitles. It is something along the lines of:

I am Evelyn Salt. I was raised in Soviet Russia.
[In Russian]Comrade!!!

That's not a direct quote, but you get the idea.