www.makemkv.com

I have just downloaded a beta trial version and am trying to archive some of my DVDs. The first ones appear to have defaulted to having subtitles on and I would appreciate someone telling me the steps needed to have this DEFAULTED to OFF

Many thanks

To make sure that MakeMKV does not set anything to default, you need to edit the profile you are using. This involves first turning on "Expert Mode" in the General section of the preferences, and using a text editor to change the file default.mmcp.xml in your MakeMKV directory.

At the top of that file, you will find a section that looks like:
Change the :5086 to something like "MyDefault", then save the file as a new file, such as "MyDefault.mmcp.xml" . You do not want to screw up the default until you are familiar with how things work. You are going to continue working in this new file.

A little lower, you will see this section:
Change the "true" to "false" where appropriate.

When done, save the file.

When you next start MakeMKV, you will see a pull-down to select the profile to use; select "MyDefault", and do a test rip to see if the settings are what you want. If they are, you can change what profile to use as default in the Advanced tab of the preferences.

Note that if you are using a different profile already, such as the FLAC or WDTV profile, you will make this change starting with the appropriate file. I've changed my default to include the changes from both of the optional profiles, along with my own tweaks.

There is an entire section of this forum dedicated to tweaks like this; you will want to read through it.

Woodstock wrote:

Code: Select all

    <mkvSettings 
        ignoreForcedSubtitlesFlag="true"
        useISO639Type2T="false"
        setFirstAudioTrackAsDefault="true"
        setFirstSubtitleTrackAsDefault="true"
        setFirstForcedSubtitleTrackAsDefault="true"
        insertFirstChapter00IfMissing="true"
    />

Change the "true" to "false" where appropriate.

Just to clarify, will this suppress forced subtitles? (Like when there's a scene in a movie where some other language is spoken briefly and you need to see them to know what's going on?)

There is an entire section of this forum dedicated to tweaks like this; you will want to read through it.

Sorry to be dense, but can you please point me toward the section you're referring to? Thanks!

Donny Bahama wrote:Sorry to be dense, but can you please point me toward the section you're referring to? Thanks!

http://makemkv.com/forum2/viewforum.php?f=10

Forum title "Advanced MakeMKV Usage".

The settings mentioned suppress whether or not to flag certain tracks as default. There are separate settings in the profile for whether or not to SELECT tracks.

For what it is worth, subtitles (forced and otherwise) are one of the places where disk authors are free to do some really stupid stuff. While both DVD and BD standards allow for "forced" subtitles such as you mention to be flagged as such within a subtitle track, doing so is actually fairly unusual. It is more likely that a separate track will include "just" the forced subtitles, and another will contain "all" subtitles, including forced, for a particular language.

And, no matter what is set as far as "default" flags, many players will assume that the first subtitle track found is a "forced" track, and display it on playback, even if you have not deliberately chosen to show subtitles. This is where other tools, such as handbrake and MKVToolnix, can allow you to rearrange the subtitle tracks (or remove them entirely, after the fact) to suit your needs.

Woodstock wrote:http://makemkv.com/forum2/viewforum.php?f=10

Forum title "Advanced MakeMKV Usage".

Got it. Thanks, Woodstock! I've been looking through that. Seems to be creating more questions for me than it's answering, but hopefully that's just a temporary thing!

The settings mentioned suppress whether or not to flag certain tracks as default. There are separate settings in the profile for whether or not to SELECT tracks.

For what it is worth, subtitles (forced and otherwise) are one of the places where disk authors are free to do some really stupid stuff. While both DVD and BD standards allow for "forced" subtitles such as you mention to be flagged as such within a subtitle track, doing so is actually fairly unusual. It is more likely that a separate track will include "just" the forced subtitles, and another will contain "all" subtitles, including forced, for a particular language.

And, no matter what is set as far as "default" flags, many players will assume that the first subtitle track found is a "forced" track, and display it on playback, even if you have not deliberately chosen to show subtitles. This is where other tools, such as handbrake and MKVToolnix, can allow you to rearrange the subtitle tracks (or remove them entirely, after the fact) to suit your needs.

I really hate it when I go to watch a movie (in English - my native language and the only language spoken in 95%+ of the movies in my collection) and the subs are on - in English. If there are things I can do (while ripping in MakeMKV) to prevent that - great. But on the other hand, I don't want to put on Cinema Paradiso and have NO subs when the whole movie is in Italian. Nor do I want to miss out on what the Somalians are saying when I'm watching Captain Phillips. (Or the Klingons in Start Trek movies, etc.)

Now, Cinema Paradiso would be a special case (at least for my movie library - I have very few foreign language films in my collection) so maybe I'd rip something like that on my Windows machine and use the GUI - but it'd be nice to have a profile for foreign-language films that worked properly and easily.

The main thing for me is that I'm trying to automate my rips - and recompression - as much as possible, and I assume that when I pass HandBrakeCLI the "--subtitle-forced=1" switch, it will take care of the Somalian and Klingon subtitles for me -- but if I don't get my conversion profile right to start with, the forced subs may not be there for Handbrake to include, so I really want to get this right. What's the best way to handle this?

I saw your post on handbrake.fr about this.... Believe me, I get where you're coming from, because the majority of my collection is Japanese, and MOST of the BD titles put the "full" subtitle track as the FIRST one, but not all of them. So, I just have MakeMKV rip everything, and post-process with batch files. I watch an episode, determine what is needed, and construct a batch file for either Handbrake's command line (usual case, because I want the video converted), or MKVMerge, to put things in the order that both the hardware players I own and VLC will treat them correctly.

Of course, I'm also retaining the original language track, because I'm taking the time to learn some Japanese, so I need to keep the full subtitle tracks....

I have found nothing that really works "automatically". But, since I work mostly with episodic titles, once I create the batch file, it will work for all the disks in that series, and that can run in the background while I pull up the next set. And I've been doing a lot of that the last two weeks, because I finally got a couple of hardware players that properly handle BD subtitles in MKV files, so ALL of my BD titles have been queued up for reprocessing. I should finish it by next weekend....

Woodstock wrote:I finally got a couple of hardware players that properly handle BD subtitles in MKV files

So if your hardware player default to subtitle off, it will still show forced subs?

"Properly handle" in my context is that it can display them and they are selectable. Prior to this, nothing I had would display a PGS subtitle track, period. I needed to get some other subtitle type if I wanted even the forced subtitles.

However, the two new ones continue to show subtitle track 1 when a file starts playing, and there is no setting in their menus to change that behavior. The only thing I can do is align the MKV files so that the first subtitle track is the "forced" track. If I weren't already processing the files through Handbrake to convert the video track, I'd simply use MKVmerge to re-order the subtitle tracks as needed, so I don't have to worry about what gets selected when ripping from the disk.

After MakeMKV scans the disc we see something like this (with all the Title boxes checked):


We need to click on the right arrow to the left of the Title box, opening many options.


I hope the attachments view correctly. Not familiar with adding attachments like this. But the instructions work, of that I'm sure.

-- Steve