Lately I've been learning tons regarding subtitles, especially regarding forced subtitles. From my understanding, there are three types of forced subtitles:
1) Forced subtitles that are part of a separate subtitle track - MakeMKV extracts the subtitle track as a whole but doesn't automatically detect as forced. For this reason, on players that support forced subtitles, the forced subtitles aren't displayed automatically unless you manually tag the subtitle as forced using a tool like MKVToolNix.
2) Forced subtitles that are embedded as part of the "main" subtitle track - Forced subtitles are within the main subtitle track. Individual forced subtitles are tagged appropriately as forced in the subtitle track. MakeMKV extracts any subtitles tagged as forced into a separate subtitle track and marks that subtitle track as forced. On players that support forced subtitles, the forced subtitles are displayed automatically without having to do anything else (e.g. manually tagging as forced with MKVToolNix).
3) Forced subtitles are "burnt" into the video - There isn't a separate forced subtitle track so there isn't any subtitle track for MakeMKV to extract. Since the subtitles are burnt into the video, they are always displayed.
With this knowledge, when ripping movies, I have been extra vigilant regarding subtitles and identifying when a subtitle is forced. Part of this workflow is consulting the following spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... TdThTkXEk/
Well, I came across a strange scenario when ripping the James Bond movie Spectre. I ripped the movie and noticed that I ended up with 3 English subtitle tracks - two that weren't marked as forced and one that was marked as forced. At first, I though one would be the "normal" subtitle track, another would be the SDH subtitle track, and the last would be the forced subtitle track. The above spreadsheet confirmed that the forced subtitle track was a separate subtitle track.
In order to help identify which track is which so I could tag them appropriately, I opened the MKV in Subtitle Edit. After inspecting the tracks, I was surprised to see that one was the SDH subtitle track, but the other two seemed to be smaller forced subtitle tracks, even though one of them wasn't marked as forced. Upon further inspection, the two subtitle tracks were identical - same number of subtitles (39) and all of the subtitles were the same.
Being slightly confused as to why there were two identical forced tracks, I loaded the original disc into MakeMKV to see how many English subtitle tracks the original disc had. I discovered that the original disc only had 2 English subtitle tracks. Made sense - the SDH subtitle track and the separate forced track. So how did I end up with 3 English subtitle tracks as part of my rip?
To try to get more info, I re-ripped the disc and discovered via the log in the bottom pane that I didn't get the error message about no forced subtitles on the SDH subtitle track. On the separate forced subtitle track though, I did get the message regarding no forced subtitles found (as expected). In other words, Spectre had both tagged forced subtitles in the SDH subtitle track and a separate subtitle track. This resulted in 3 English subtitle tracks:
1) The original SDH subtitle track.
2) The forced subtitle track extracted from the SDH subtitle track and marked as forced.
3) The separate forced subtitle track which wasn't marked as forced.
Is this a common scenario where a movie has both a normal/SDH subtitle with forced subtitles and a separate forced subtitle track? Just curious.