Subtitles for Dummies, or At Least Newbies

[AVGeek99]

I'm about two weeks in ripping my 4K Blu Ray collection. I'm putting my movies on a Synology NAS, which is where my Plex Media Server is running. My primary Plex playback client is a 2019 nVidia Shield Pro. All I have been using is makeMKV ripping to .mkv files and placing them on my NAS. I'm not using handbrake, MKVToolNix or any other tool I've seen referenced in my searching. I'm not familiar with any of them, but I can learn if necessary.

It took me about a week before I discovered you could open up the file tree and see what languages and subtitles were included, and then I discovered you could set a default language, which I had set do English. By default this unchecks all other languages, including subtitles, forced or otherwise. I ripped a few that way and now I'm all but certain I'm not getting foreign language subtitles.

All I'm really looking to know is what is the simplest surefire way to ensure I get foreign language subtitles (when they exist) while I am watching with the english audio and someone is speakign in a different language. Sometimes I get warning errors referencing an "AV Sync error at 00:00:00 in track xyz..." related to subtitles. It makes me think that subtitles are tied to the same language audio, but that is just my newbie speculation.

Am I ok to uncheck audio languages I don't want and then just leave all subtitles selected. Am I ok to only leave all "forced" subtitles selected, or should I just have all subtitles selected to be safe. Or am I better off just selecting all audio languages and subtitles?

Thank you.

[Woodstock]

The answer is, "Maybe, could be!"

The only safe way to do things is to extract EVERY language track, and toss the ones you don't want out later. The reason? Disk authors suck at naming stuff and composing disks.

Forced subtitles can be tagged as forced within the main subtitle track, or just be a separate track, with nothing marked as forced. Some can be placed on the side of the speaker, most are centered in the frame. Sometimes, they have multiple tracks. They subtitle the audio commentary. Or ... ?

Subtitles are important to me - my main ripping is of anime.

Audio sync errors are usually information, as MakeMKV will usually correct the sync issues when they're less than a second.

[AVGeek99]

Thank you!! And how do you "toss out" language tracks you don't want after the .mkv has already been created?

[Woodstock]

Two ways. First is the long way, HANDBRAKE. Everything I do, goes through handbrake to shrink it. Anime typically shrinks 80-90%, because it isn't that complex. Movies, 50% is typical. But I can tweak out the audio and subtitle tracks at the same time. A typical rip will get converted (used to) have stereo English, 5.1 or better English, plus one or two tracks of Japanese. I've cut that to just 5.1 recently. I also choose which subtitle tracks to keep.

For those things I don't want to shrink, I'll just run mkvtoolnix to remove the tracks I don't want.

Handbrake takes time to run; mkvtoolnix moves pretty quickly, since it isn't re-encoding stuff.

(I cheat, though - I run it all as scripts, rather than using their GUIs)

[AVGeek99]

Thanks!! I want 1:1 bit copies, both audio and video, so no reencoding or compression. Looks like I need to get mkvtoolnix.

Thank you again!!

[AVGeek99]

I've installed mkvtoolnix, so now I can go back and strip out all of the language and subtitle tracks I don't need/want. It's pretty simple to use, at least to remove audio and subtitle tracks, which is all I've done so far.

But I have a question about subtitles. For subtitles all I want is English, removing others is easy enough. I have my Plex server configured ot autmatically display English subtitles when there is a non-english language being spoken. So obviously I want forced subtitles. But I've noticed when ripping movies in makemkv there are sometimes multiple english subtitle tracks, forced and unforced. When I'm in mkvtoolnix I see the english subtitle tracks, but none are flagged as forced. So in order to get the subtitles to display appropriately I need to mark one as flagged. Is there a simple way to identify which of the subtitle tracks should be marked as forced?

[sterickson]

Another tool to try, to get info about your MKV file, is MediaInfo. [Edited for typos.]