Subtitling Question?

[DawnB88]

I have disc 1 "Heroes Season 1" from DVD ripped. Now I know they speak a few different languages on the DVD and there are subtitles that can be turned on or off and there in 3 different languages. When using Makemkv I kept the video and the English subtitles. But when I play the video I can turn off the subtitles and there still there but only for people not speaking English. So if there speaking Japanese I see the subtitles but I have them turned off. Dose this mean that I do not need to add the subtitles on the video with handbrake. Or is this because I left the subtitles on the check boxes when picking out the parts I wanted to keep from makemkv.

I do want to keep the subtitles as they are but I want to make sure that when I convert the files from mkv to mp4 with handbrake I will not lose the subtitles if I don't add the subtitles. I hope this makes sense.

[Woodstock]

Subtitles on DVDs are (generally) VOBSUB graphic subtitles. Technically, these are not allowed in MP4 files, but... handbrake will make an exception and put them in, because MOST players accept them.

When Bluray came out, the subtitles were PGS... which (again) are not allowed in MP4 files, but there isn't a exception to allow them. Handbrake will burn these in if selected, so they become a permanent part of the video. Some people "fix" this, by running the subtitles through a graphic-to-text conversion, but that's not 100% accurate.

I used to put up with this; nowadays, though, I use players that support MKV instead, and don't worry about it. And subtitles aren't just for people who can't understand the language. Some of us are having issues with HEARING the language, and like the subtitle option.

[dcoke22]

But when I play the video I can turn off the subtitles and there still there but only for people not speaking English. So if they're speaking Japanese I see the subtitles but I have them turned off.

Those are called forced subtitles and it would seem that they're 'burned in'. This doesn't have anything to do with what you selected in MakeMKV, they're in the video regardless. Not all movies & TV shows are this way; sometimes forced subtitles end up in their own subtitle track.

I do want to keep the subtitles as they are but I want to make sure that when I convert the files from mkv to mp4 with handbrake I will not lose the subtitles if I don't add the subtitles. I hope this makes sense.

As Woodstock said, the .mkv file format handles subtitles much better than .mp4 files.

[DawnB88]

Not all of my videos on my TV Show hard drive are of the best quality. Some of them are DVD quality and some say that they are but have things on them and I don't notice until I watch the episode all the way through. For example "Grimm" had to have several episodes re-downloaded since they would have things like "Small TV show information clips over the video." Things like this show will be starting at this time or for next week previews and such. So I had to re-download several that actually stated that they had been DVDRip on the file name on the video playing. Some of the TV Shows had been downloaded years ago so the DVDs had not been out yet or not been out for the full show.

So now I have the best quality of several shows and episodes are like 2,3,500 MB in file size. But there still good enough to watch on a basic 32" HDTV. Its nothing fancy and I want to keep the file sizes smaller.

So the plan was to rip all my current DVDs and convert them into mp4 files and have subtitles for parts in other languages.But if there burned in that would make things so much easier.

I know for the first disc of "Heroes" season 1 there burned in and if this continues for all parts not just Japanese I would like to not have to worry about adding subtitles. But I also have the show "24 Season 1 and 3" and I'm pretty sure they might have or need to be subtitled as well.

So I guess what I'm asking is this how can I make the videos as small as possible and have it so I can turn off/on the subtitles for the parts that need them that don't have them.

Plus a little more info: I will be ripping these DVDs with my windows 10 laptop with built in DVD player and the only reason why I'm backing up the DVDs is so I can have them added onto my hard drive that I will be using with Kodi. I was going to watch Heroes yesterday since I have not seen it for years and clicked on it and noticed there was no season 1. And then I was like what the hell happened to season 1 and then I remembered I have it on DVD. So instead of worrying about playing the DVDs in order I just want to back them up on the hard drive so there all together.

I heard mp4 is the best option for smaller file sizes without losing much for quality.

So here is what I need help with:
What are the best options for handbreak with mkv files?
Should I convert them to mp4 since there just going to stay on a hard drive and be played by "VLC"?
How do I add subtitles that can be turned on and off? Do I need to find the srt files online?
Or do I just keep going through makemkv and and make sure the "Subtitles English" are always checked?

I'm still new to all this so any advice would be greatly appreciated. And yes I do know that I should be asking on handbrake about handbrake but since not everyone on handbrake uses makemkvI don't know where to really ask about both things.

[Woodstock]

Converting them to MP4 is not going to save you significant space, as the video will be pretty much the same. There may be differences in how the subtitles encode... but not much. The key is what you play them with, and VLC will play either one just fine.

Compressing the video is what saves the space. A rather extreme example is an anime series, where the raw BD video is 6GB, the compressed MKV is 640 MB (about 85% smaller). Doing Doctor Who episodes (DVD-type) makes them about 60% smaller to either MKV or MP4 with handbrake. Difference is in how "noisy" the source is, and whether you ask the compression tool (handbrake in my case) to clean up the noise.

Again, the choice of MP4 or MKV depends on playback devices. Car players almost demand MP4. Phone players favor it, but better phones do both. VLC does either.

The fun part is, you get to experiment! There is no single answer, despite old guys like me pushing things.

[flojo]

I heard mp4 is the best ...

Rip your discs down to a smaller size using H.265. For a single 42 minute _DVD_ TV episode with 1 audio track, target a ~250MB file size. Use .mkv as the container type, not .mp4.

The file size crunching of the file with which ever algorithm you use isn't really dependent on the bitrate of the input video stream, but you should pretend it is.

The catch is that no matter the resolution, it really depends on the quality of the source all the way from the camera lens chosen to whoever encoded what is on the retail disc. If you always assume that the source is great, amazing, perfect from lens to disc, and if that disc uses a higher bitrate, then you must yourself use a higher bitrate when you go to crunch it down in size. If you don't, you will introduce artifacts. If you don't or can't visually inspect every source file on the disc, then you can use the bitrate to determine your encoding settings, but you must first define which bitrates are bad, good, excellent, etc. I can tell you now that many Blu-ray releases of TV shows vary wildly on quality and bitrate but nearly all of them with a low bitrate are coincidentally low visual quality. Higher bitrate files can be low visual quality too, but a higher bitrate usually requires more discs and more discs increase cost and a cost increase can represent someone caring about presentation.

bad_bitrate_settings if bitrate < 2500
media_bitrate_settings if bitrate == 2500
great_bitrate_settings if bitrate > 2500
etc... but you must define the median/reference value