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I want to reliably and quickly identify if there are any forced subtitles in a movie. Can anyone recommend an editor for forced subtitles? i want to be able to preview the text to see if there is in fact anything included, previewing the playback to see if there are forced subtitles does not work since its not known when during playback a forced subtitle may be shown.

cheers
Z

Really? So if you play the video from the beginning and while someone's talking no subtitle is shown, does that not identify it as a forced sub quicly and reliably?

No, it doesn't. So the example is its an English language film but someone is speaking French or Vulcan or what have you riefly or a few times in the movie, or there's a road sign in a foreign language and a forced subtitle in English appears. But this is not continuous non-English dialogue, so you have to actually find that or those scenes to know if there is a forced subtitle, and of course if the track is not properly flagged it wont get picked up by the player, hence the need for human intervention

The problem is that there is no way to "quickly and reliably" locate forced subtitles, because they may or may not be flagged, and they may or may not be in a separate subtitle track.

Z0001 wrote:No, it doesn't. So the example is its an English language film but someone is speaking French or Vulcan or what have you riefly or a few times in the movie, or there's a road sign in a foreign language and a forced subtitle in English appears.

Gosh, you play the movie and wait for the first scene where a person talks English. If there is one subtitle track that is NOT showing any items at this moment then this OBVIOUSLY is the forced sub. There is no need whatsoever to search for the first forced sub item (be it a sign or some speaking Klingon) because the forced sub is giving itself away by having NO item displayed when some regular talk is being done. Can't be that difficult.

Chetwood wrote:

Z0001 wrote:No, it doesn't. So the example is its an English language film but someone is speaking French or Vulcan or what have you riefly or a few times in the movie, or there's a road sign in a foreign language and a forced subtitle in English appears.

Gosh, you play the movie and wait for the first scene where a person talks English. If there is one subtitle track that is NOT showing any items at this moment then this OBVIOUSLY is the forced sub. There is no need whatsoever to search for the first forced sub item (be it a sign or some speaking Klingon) because the forced sub is giving itself away by having NO item displayed when some regular talk is being done. Can't be that difficult.

What you describe is not my experience. I have had movies ripped with makemkv with all subtitle tracks such as makemkv finds included in the rip, but my player does not display forced subtitles. So I'm looking to understand why, and fix it.

There can be a number of factors. Which subtitle track is played is player-specific. Some respect flags like "default". Most do NOT.

I own hardware players from Asus, Micca, Uebo, Seagate, and now KDLinks and Blusmart. All have remarkably similar software. And all but the Asus seem to play the FIRST subtitle track found automatically, no matter what language it is, or how it is flagged. To account for this, my Handbrake settings always move whatever turns out to be the forced subtitle track to the first position. I tried using the "default" flag, and none of them respected it.

Software players vary all over the place.

To that end, MakeMKV is not the only software that video goes through on its way into my media server, just the first.

Z0001 wrote:What you describe is not my experience.

What I've been describing is a simple way to manually identify the forced sub track without searching an entire track for the first item translating a sign or foreign language, as you seem to have been doing. Thus pointing out that your suggestion of adding a forced subtitle editor is pointless.

What I haven't described is the reason why you won't see forced subs on your standalone cause that wasn't asked in your original posting. Thankfully Woodstock has answered that in the meantime. Which means, even if Mike were to waste time adding a forced subtitle editor to MakeMKV, it still wouldn't fix any problems with your standalones.

Chetwood wrote:

Z0001 wrote:No, it doesn't. So the example is its an English language film but someone is speaking French or Vulcan or what have you riefly or a few times in the movie, or there's a road sign in a foreign language and a forced subtitle in English appears.

Gosh, you play the movie and wait for the first scene where a person talks English. If there is one subtitle track that is NOT showing any items at this moment then this OBVIOUSLY is the forced sub. There is no need whatsoever to search for the first forced sub item (be it a sign or some speaking Klingon) because the forced sub is giving itself away by having NO item displayed when some regular talk is being done. Can't be that difficult.

That isn't 100% accurate. I have had films with a sub track that isn't the main subtitle but flashes a graphic up on screen like a director's commentary infrequently. They could be minutes apart.

Only watching the film helps me identify sub tracks. I realise this is completely useless to the OP but I don't know any other way.

I've said this before, extract the subtitles with MKVExtract (I have a .bat designed solely for this purpose) then look at the things using DVDSubExtractor.

And there is some weird arse crap on some Blu Rays.

ndjamena wrote:I've said this before, extract the subtitles with MKVExtract (I have a .bat designed solely for this purpose) then look at the things using DVDSubExtractor.

If you're not OCR'ing BDSUB2SUP is faster than Subextractor.

matt198t wrote: That isn't 100% accurate. I have had films with a sub track that isn't the main subtitle but flashes a graphic up on screen like a director's commentary infrequently.

Doesn't change the meaning of what I wrote: watching the first minute(s) of a BD in VLC is enough to tell apart regular from DC from forced sub.

Chetwood wrote:

ndjamena wrote:I've said this before, extract the subtitles with MKVExtract (I have a .bat designed solely for this purpose) then look at the things using DVDSubExtractor.

If you're not OCR'ing BDSUB2SUP is faster than Subextractor.

Faster at what? If you're just looking at the things all you need to do is add the subtitles file name to the command line and they both open and display the subtitles automatically. There's no speed difference there other than that BDSUB2SUP is a .jar executable that isn't set up to allow drag and drop by default.

I have the BDSUB2SUP and DVDSubExtractor executables in the same folder anyway.

Chetwood wrote:

matt198t wrote: That isn't 100% accurate. I have had films with a sub track that isn't the main subtitle but flashes a graphic up on screen like a director's commentary infrequently.

Doesn't change the meaning of what I wrote: watching the first minute(s) of a BD in VLC is enough to tell apart regular from DC from forced sub.

If you know before hand that you have a subtitle track and a forced track no one is arguing that it's easy to tell them apart. On the other hand if you don't know and you just assume anything that doesn't show text when someone is talking is a forced track then you're an idiot. Plus it doesn't explain what happens when you find multiple tracks with that quality in a single title.

I gave up trying to identify subtitles through watching the movies long ago... I'm wondering what the hell you've been ripping all this time to have not found yourself in the same situation.

Actually, the only way I know of to figure out if a subtitle is forced is that MakeMKV creates dummy tracks for each of the subtitles tracks to move the subtitles flagged as forced into, then removes any of those tracks that turn out to be empty. So if you wind up with a series of subtitle tracks with track numbers of 6, 8, 10, 11, 12 and 14 then obviously track number 11 is forced. Of course that doesn't always happen, sometimes track 11 is just a duplicate of track 10 and really anything can happen so there's no guarantees here, but it does give you a really big hint as to what's what.

ndjamena wrote:Faster at what?

At browsing the items without having to press the next button.

ndjamena wrote:If you know before hand that you have a subtitle track and a forced track no one is arguing that it's easy to tell them apart. On the other hand if you don't know and you just assume anything that doesn't show text when someone is talking is a forced track then you're an idiot.

Gee, thanks! So what else can it be? It can't be a regular sub, an SDH sub, nor a DC sub, as you can easily find out by switching audio streams.

ndjamena wrote:Plus it doesn't explain what happens when you find multiple tracks with that quality in a single title.

It's usually the English, German, whatever forced sub.

ndjamena wrote:I gave up trying to identify subtitles through watching the movies long ago... I'm wondering what the hell you've been ripping all this time to have not found yourself in the same situation.

Ever wondered that's because you are the idiot?

You seem to be arguing just for the sake of arguing at this point. You can just use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through the subtitles, I guess you could begin the conversion process and watch the subtitles fly by and BDSUP2SUB would be faster for that, but I wouldn't do it that way anyway because it's missing the point.

I've had forced tracks for commentaries, tracks that convert animal noises to words plus trivia tracks with barely anything in them and things I can't even be bothered remembering.

I'm just going to assume a lack of experience and a big mouth on your part at this point and completely ignore you.