Forced Subtitles Why So Hard??

[mateytate]

Why is it the whole forced subtitle issue is so hard to deal with? I use MakeMKV and Handbrake to rip my BDs but getting the forced subtitles right is hit and miss. Why does my Blu-ray player know which ones and which tracks to select. Why cant MakeMKV give you the option as your Blu-ray player does of what country you want and automatically rip only the correct forced subtitles. Is it that hard to implement? I know it causes me problems, I know it causes many others hours of re encoding to sort out as well.

[Chetwood]

Check out this thread for why it's so hard.

[mateytate]

Thank you for the link, will give it a read. Appreciate you taking the time to reply!!

[Stryker412]

Matey, I created a Google Doc a long time ago for this very reason. With some great people over at AVS we have tried to keep this up to date. This is so you can just check the spreadsheet first before ripping the disc and know if there's any forced subs.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... rYlE#gid=0

Feel free to contribute.

[SJNBham]

The spreadsheet above is a real help - thank you! I was wondering if someone could confirm something for me. I was trying to follow along the seemingly very complicated threads and online helps to get some forced subtitles to work. I had almost given up entirely and was frustrated there's not a straightforward way to watch my Blu-ray movies without swapping disks. Then I think I accidentally discovered a workaround. Here's what I did:

1) Use MakeMKV to copy Cars 2 with English subtitles to a directory called Cars 2
2) Download a copy of the English subtitles from the Internet (there are many sources for this)
3) Edit the .srt file to only have the forced subtitles (see the spreadsheet link above for the time stamps you're looking for)
4) Place the .srt file in the Cars 2 directory created in step 1 above.
5) Use XMBC to play back the movie

If you don't have the SRT file in the directory, full English subtitles are shown throughout the movie. However, when the SRT file is present and has been edited down to only include the forced subtitle entries, it appears to suppress the non-forced subtitles. I even tried creating new subtitles of my own and it appeared in the movie. Kind of fun actually. Anyway, this is what the SRT file looks like after being edited down. Not sure if you have to change the sequence number (1,2,3,etc), but I did. So the second entry is now #2 instead of like 450 or something like that. You can use a simple text editor to make the changes.

Code: Select all

1
00:13:03,355 --> 00:13:04,515
How should I know?

2
00:25:11,664 --> 00:25:14,393
My condolences.

This seemed a whole lot easier than the other utilities cited and remuxing, etc

[Chetwood]

Nothing's suppressed. Most players simply prefer external over embedded subs. SRT subs will also lose you postition and color information.