www.makemkv.com

Sorry I've been searching but haven't found a way to automatically name/rename Forced subtitle tracks to something else like "Forced". This isn't a selection problem, I have everything getting selected the way I want. But it really helps me identify Forced subtitles in other tools (like mkvtoolnix) if these are named something recognizable like Forced. I do this by hand now, but it would be a lot faster if makemkv did it automagically. Thanks for any help.

MakeMKV won't do this natively, so I would recommend checking out MKVToolNix. It's an extra step, but it'll allow you to apply a label to a track, mark it the default track or set the 'forced' flag, etc.. A handy tool for working with .mkvs.

Forced subtitles are created for every subtitles track, the ones that turn out to be empty are removed. The crux being each of those subtitle tracks were assigned "track numbers" and it's impossible to change the "track number" after the file has been ripped because it's repeated in every packet that contains data for the track.

The point being, unless you've specifically unchecked some of the forced subtitles, every second "track number" after the audio tracks have finished WILL BE MISSING EXCEPT FOR THE ACTUAL FORCED SUBTITLES. All you'd need to do is search for subtitle tracks with sequential "track numbers" and you'll find your forced subtitles.

Of course it's not that simple. Sometimes forced subtitles are separated into their own track, and sometimes those tracks are in no way labelled as forced subtitles because on playback Java commands are used to display the subtitles rather than forced subtitle flags and MakeMKV can't really help you with that.

The other way to identify forced subtitles is to look at the file in MediaInfo and look at the "Count of elements" field for the subtitle tracks. Forced subtitles should have a much lower count than regular subtitles, it's also a way of identifying the difference between SDH and regular subtitles.

Of course the problem with that is that sometimes there are other tracks in the file that could have a low count like a forced subtitles track would, sing along tracks, under-utilised production notes etc. Sometimes the only way to truly identify which subtitles are which is to extract the things from the file and look at them using programs like DVD Subextractor or BDSuptoSub.

Once you've identified the forced subtitles you can label them yourself using MKVPropEdit or the MKVToolnix GUI header editor. Relying on MakeMKV to do it, even if it could, would be a rather hit and miss affair.

Thanks. It doesnt sound like there is a way to do this then. I'm not really looking for a magic bullet here, I already use mkvtoolnix and basically go through each track manually to determine what it is. But if a track that makemkv thought was forced, was already named forced when i open it, that would give me a leg up.

Thats basically what I do now, but I have to manually type in 'Forced' for each relevant track, the vast majority of which are just dropped by makemkv anyway.

Like I said, you just have to look for sequential "track numbers" to find the subtitles MakeMKV thinks are "forced". If you're using windows a simple powershell script using MKVMerge -J identification should be able to rename all the subtitles created from flagged forced subtitles quite easily.

You can't even do what you're asking via MakeMKVCon, since the method of renaming tracks isn't part of the command line. The MakeMKV GUI itself seems to communicate with MakeMKVCon via a pipe, a method which as far as I'm aware no one other than the authors knows how to use. That leaves a lot of MakeMKVs functionality hidden and since the GUI itself is intentionally rather threadbare what we're actually capable of doing with MakeMKV is rather more limited than what most of us would like. Mike doesn't seem inclined to fix that.

Hi, can I join the conversation? For the first time now I try to add forced subtitels (Narcos, they are speaking Spanish often, I want English forced subtitles). But MakeMKV shows me in the German version of the DVD just three subtitles: two German and one English. So how can I find forced subtitles in the first place? From the conversation I learned it must be easy to rip with just forced. Is there even an advanced settings command to make it automatic? Thank you very much!

EDIT: The one english subtitle was the forced one and only contains those. This surprised me. So I suspect it is like this all the time: One of the english ones is the forced.

Feel free to delete my post.