Question regarding forced subtitles

[demariners]

I have read through the FAQ and had some follow up questions. Perhaps I am reading the FAQ wrong.

I notice some rips are missing the subtitles for foreign speaking parts; however, some films do not have this issue and they're embedded. Sometimes, not all the time, I end up having to change the subtitle to get the subtitles for the foreign only.

It is there a program or possibly a setting I am missing to embed these subtitles automatically in the main movie? Such that I do not have to manually change the subtitle from none to "english" or something which can usually be 5 or so different ones and find the correct one.

Thank you!

[Woodstock]

Handbrake will burn subtitles in for you.

[demariners]

How long does it typically take to do? I will have to look into it.

How do I know which subtitle track is the one? Is this something easy to see? Also, I presume it does not change the audio/video quality chaprters, etc... when using it.

[Woodstock]

Burning time depends on the video and your choices for it. The subtitles don't really affect the time.

Right now, I'm running a batch script to tell handbrake to rip Phi Brain (anime series), and it's doing about 45 frames per second. When I was doing Ranma 1/2 (161 episodes), it was doing about 20 FPS. If I were using hardware encoding (MUCH faster!!! but has some issues with details of video), I could have gotten about 200-230 FPS.

But my reason for doing it this way is that it cuts video size by 90% on anime, and I can rearrange the order of subtitle tracks... A lot of anime videos put the main subtitle track FIRST, and the forced subtitles SECOND, so they play weird when not running from the scripts on the BDs.

[demariners]

I see, so. I have never used handbrake before. My main question is. If I wanted to just take the mkv and make an exact copy of it using handbrake. How do I know what settings to do? I see there are a ton of settings. Just want a 1:1 copy with the subtitles attached.

[Woodstock]

"exact copy" is not going to involve handbrake. It WILL encode the video, and usually make it smaller. In fact, I'm not aware of any tool that can encode the subtitles onto the video that doesn't reencode it per it's rules. It has to extract (decode) the frame, draw the subtitle, then reencode the frame, all without knowledge of how the original authors encoded it.

The closest is to use a player that can do this dynamically, during playback. A friend of mine asked me last night how to do this for his TV. We're going to experiment with various tools today, but he isn't asking for "maintain the video". He WANTS the video shrunk (22gb Bluray down to 4gb in his tests), but wanted subtitles in his MP4... without hard-coding. Ain't happening.

[demariners]

Yea, I kind of figured that.

I honestly do not care to shrink it down. I actually would rather have it uncompressed as much as possible. I guess I was just asking what settings are best to keep it as much as possible 1:1 and maintain it as a .mkv as well. I would assume, by doing this it would be much faster but who knows.

Thanks!

[flojo]

subtitles in his MP4... without hard-coding.

If you're going to experiment you should try to add support for subtitles in your preferred player. No player supports the "DATUM" or possibly "tbox" (never used tbox myself) fields for Quicktime. Circa 2001 I put subtitles in Quicktime containers using a "DATUM" field which if I remember right, was left out of the spec. docs. but was/is similar to using Base64 with "CDATA" tags in XML, by which I mean it was basically a blob that could store anything but of course you did have to parse the blob for headers of known subtitle types.

I've never used "tbox" so I have no idea how/if it works, but they're seemingly text only: https://developer.apple.com/documentati ... itle_media

Quicktime/MP4 is O.K. but Matroska is definitely better/easier for players, especially now that its RFC is final.

[demariners]

Thank you. I guess part of my initial question still was not answered as I do not quite understand how this all works.

So, let's say I have a BD or UHD or whatever, it comes with a series of subtitles. Some of them are English, sometimes other languages right. When I am ripping some movies, I guess there is a "secret" subtitle track that contains the English subtitles only for the foreign parts of the film? Is that the "Forced" subtitles. How am I able to know what subtitle track that is. Sometimes I have to within my player select one and cross my fingers that it is that one and not the full subtitles for English also.

If anyone can explain it to me that would be wonderful. I have been trying to figure this out for years.

[Woodstock]

Yes, the forced subtitles are the ones for foreign dialog or signs in the film. If the movie dialog is in English, those won't be there.

Subtitles can be done multiple ways, though. Officially, you have a "subtitle track", with certain subtitles flagged as "forced", and they're the only ones that get displayed unless you turn on subtitles.

What happens more often, though, is multiple tracks - one with just the forced subtitles, one with "all" of them, and (sometimes) commentary tracks are used. MakeMKV's default is to try to separate the combined track mentioned above into separate ones for compatibility (not all players work with combos). When it hits a disk with separate tracks, you'll see messages about "Track #xx was empty and removed" for the generated tracks.

Occasionally, you'll get something like the series Bleach, where they only put one, combined subtitle track in, with no flags set; you can either watch subtitles to see what the signs say, or not know.

[flojo]

a "secret" subtitle track

No. If you open your resulting "movie.mkv" in MKVToolnix GUI you will see all subtitle tracks, in fact you can see all streams of all types. Your player will probably display the first subtitle/stream flagged as "default" and/or "forced". The exception to this is that if your player can be set to use a specific language as priority, then the subtitle tracks matching that language will be used first, selecting "default" or "froced" from them if found.

Open a .mkv file in MKVToolNix GUI and look at the streams. Click on the "Header editor" option on the left and open the file to edit flags like "default" or "forced". If you speak English and only want subtitles if they are for non-English parts, then mark the subtitle you want as "default" and "forced". Flags are simply the 2 boolean values "True" and "False", or actually the header editor refers to them as "Yes" or "No". Anyways, I *think* MakeMKV will set these flags for you so you probably won't need to do this.

If MakeMKV cannot determine the flags on the Blu-ray or DVD disc then you have to manually go through them to determine which is which :-/... it's not fun (I don't do it). But double check in the header editor, they actually might be identified but are simply not flagged as "default" or "forced".

[demariners]

Does MKVToolNix allow me to select the "default" subtitles track then and it sticks to the .mkv file?

[Woodstock]

Mkvtoolnix can do just about anything within an MKV file; it comes from the guy that developed the standard.

Typically, I simply use the flags on a file that's already got the track in it. Here's the command I use, as part of a Windows batch file:

Code: Select all

c:\MKVTools\MKVToolNix\mkvpropedit.exe %1 -e track:s1 --set flag-default=1 --set flag-forced=1 --edit info --set "title=%~n1"

It assume that I've already run the file through handbrake, so it has the subtitles in the order "forced only, everything", and sets the first one to both be "forced" and "default" to cover most players. It also changes the name embedded in the file to match its filename, because a lot of what I'm running has names like "Ranma 1_2 HD139-146.mk" embedded in them by MakeMKV.

For your use, you can simply tell it to copy only the track you want into the output. I've been using the properties editor (mkvpropedit) alone, but starting mkvtoolnix will open a window to controlling the whole thing. It's worth the time to play with it.

[animepahe572]

Forced subtitles are subtitles that appear automatically during a movie or show, even when the main subtitle track is turned off. They are typically used only for segments that require translation—such as foreign-language dialogue, alien speech, signs, or text that the viewer is supposed to understand regardless of subtitle settings. Unlike full subtitle tracks (which display all dialogue), forced subtitles are embedded or flagged so the player shows them by default, ensuring that essential story information isn’t missed. How they appear can vary between discs, streaming platforms, and media players, which sometimes leads to confusion when forced subtitles don’t show up or when users accidentally select a track that includes more than just the forced lines.

[demariners]

Mkvtoolnix can do just about anything within an MKV file; it comes from the guy that developed the standard.

Typically, I simply use the flags on a file that's already got the track in it. Here's the command I use, as part of a Windows batch file:

Code: Select all

c:\MKVTools\MKVToolNix\mkvpropedit.exe %1 -e track:s1 --set flag-default=1 --set flag-forced=1 --edit info --set "title=%~n1"

It assume that I've already run the file through handbrake, so it has the subtitles in the order "forced only, everything", and sets the first one to both be "forced" and "default" to cover most players. It also changes the name embedded in the file to match its filename, because a lot of what I'm running has names like "Ranma 1_2 HD139-146.mk" embedded in them by MakeMKV.

For your use, you can simply tell it to copy only the track you want into the output. I've been using the properties editor (mkvpropedit) alone, but starting mkvtoolnix will open a window to controlling the whole thing. It's worth the time to play with it.

This is great. How long does it typically take? I presume it does not effect the quality of the original then and keeps it 1:1?