Forced subtitles in 2022

[bitfidelity]

Haven't used MakeMKV in a while.

Has there been any changes as to how the program handles forced subtitles?

From what I recall, MakeMKV creates a separate track if it finds forced subtitles but doesn't actually flag the track as forced.

Is this still the case?

[dcoke22]

More or less, yes. I often find that blu-rays with forced subtitles are authored such that the forced subtitles are just a regular subtitle track. In any case, I've gotten pretty good with 'mkvpropedit' to set the flags as appropriate after the rip is finished.

[bitfidelity]

I think the most sure-fire way to approach this is to simply include (mux) the main subtitle track, which always includes the forced subtitles (assuming there are any) anyway. LAV Filters can then be used to filter out the forced subtitles for users who desire that option.

Thoughts, or am I missing something?

[dcoke22]

I don't think your supposition that the 'main' subtitle track always includes the forced subtitles if there are any is true.

I would say the best strategy is to rip all the subtitle tracks for whatever language(s) you're interested in and then figure out what the subtitle tracks are by turning them on while watching the rip. Some tracks are vanilla subtitles. Some are SDH subtitles. Some are subtitles for commentary tracks. Some regular subtitle tracks are in fact only the forced subtitles. Rarely the forced subtitles are in the regular subtitle track and marked as forced (and would thus show up in one of MakeMKV's forced subtitle tracks). On DVDs sometimes the subtitles are really closed captions. Some subtitle tracks contain trivia about the movie. Some subtitle tracks are commentary about the movie that don't have a corresponding audio track (I just ran across an example of this on an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise).

There's no rhyme, reason, standard, or convention to subtitle tracks that I've ever been able to divine. All those decisions are up to the disc's author and they're usually not flagged or named in any useful way.

[bitfidelity]

I see what you mean.

Coincidentally, I just de-muxed a movie with English subtitles that were ordered like this:

1. SDH subtitles (no forced flags)
2. Regular subtitles (forced flags, 30 forced captions)
3. Subtitles for commentary

The good news is that I just came upon a website called Subscene that seems to be very good at indicating whether a movie has forced subtitles or not (enable (English) (Foreign Only) filter), so I'll only have to go through the subtitle nightmare on a case-by-case basis.

[Chetwood]

Is this still the case?

Yes, but if a forced sub IS identified and you've set

setFirstForcedSubtitleTrackAsDefault="true"

in your config file, it will be set to default which also displays the sub automatically in many cases.