Post
by Woodstock » Tue Sep 29, 2015 12:43 pm
Subtitles are ... an interesting study in preferences at the studio level.
Dealing with subtitles on just about everything I rip, I find that the most often used method is two tracks for each language. One contains "everything", one contains only the so-called "forced" subtitles, for signs and non-dubbed language sections. And the order of the subtitle tracks can be either forced-first, or forced-second.
Occasionally, you will find titles (like Avatar) that have a subtitle track with everything, but some (the navi translations) are marked "forced".
And then there are the companies that only put one subtitle track in, all subtitles are in it, and no distinction is made between types. You either have them on all the time, or you have to guess at the meaning of signs and other writing.
And the player itself comes into the picture, in that some will ALWAYS play the FIRST subtitle track found, so you want to make sure that the correct one for your normal viewing situation is first.
The way I deal with it is to rip all tracks, and remove/re-order them after the fact. Since I run everything handbrake before it goes on the media server, I watch sections with VLC to get information on which subtitle tracks are which, then use that to create the batch jobs to do the conversion. If you don't want to go through the time of a recoding of the video, you can use tools like mkvmerge to re-order the tracks and strip out the unneeded ones.
