Botched subtitles when ripping Avatar

[MickM]

I get the sense there might be some confusion about how frequently people think the SDH bleeding occurs for the issue I'm reporting. The "Speaking in Na'vi" SDH doesn't occur before every subtitle cluster - it occurs rarely and, in my case, I posted a couple specific times that it does occur. If the same thing happened while playing the disc on my Blu-ray player I'd conclude the disc was authored badly, but it plays perfectly on the player so it's reasonable to conclude it's a MakeMKV thing.

[preserve]

I have the Extended CE with 3 cuts so it looks like it's a different disc, and ripped with 1.10.8... I have no non-forced subtitles incorrectly included in the forced-only track in those scenes at the timecodes shown. But that's not necessarily proof of anything, as I ripped it way back when and it's a different disc. Does sound like it could be a bug in MakeMKV.

[Chetwood]

Like I said, I've check the entired subtitle track for this and on my BD there isn't an item like this. You could still upload your demuxed subs so we can have a look.

[preserve]

ripped with 1.10.8... I have no non-forced subtitles incorrectly included in the forced-only track in those scenes at the timecodes shown.

I re-ripped with 1.15.2 and again had no problems. Again I do have a different disc but this is still suggesting no issue on MakeMKV side. Other than posting the demuxed subs as suggested by Chetwood so that they can be examined, I only have one other suggestion... your screenshot suggests you're ripping only the forced subs. Try ripping both English sub tracks, and then see if there's any change when watching the forced-only track.

[dcoke22]

It seems the OP and I have the same disc & I ripped both subtitle tracks. The other subtitle track is subtitles for everything, as one would expect.

[dcoke22]

I extracted the forced subtitles with mkvextract.

Code: Select all

mkvmerge -i Avatar.mkv 
File 'Avatar.mkv': container: Matroska
Track ID 0: video (MPEG-4p10/AVC/H.264)
Track ID 1: audio (DTS-HD Master Audio)
Track ID 2: audio (DTS)
Track ID 3: audio (AC-3)
Track ID 4: subtitles (HDMV PGS)
Track ID 5: subtitles (HDMV PGS)
Chapters: 36 entries

mkvextract Avatar.mkv tracks 5:forcedsubs.sup

Since they're PGS subtitles (image based), I used a free online service to convert them to SRT format (text based). (https://subtitletools.com)

You can see a subset of them here (for the next couple days): https://subtitletools.com/subpicture/ae ... 214c9c420b

In the subset of 10 that are available online, there are two that are SDH. In the downloaded .srt there are several examples like this.

Code: Select all

39
00:47:02,069 --> 00:47:03,237
(EXCLAIMS IN ANNOYANCE)

It seems clear that SDH subtitles are in the forced subtitle track of the MKV I made of my copy of Avatar.

[MickM]

Sorry - after my last post I figured I had confirmed a makemkv bug and kind of left it to the devs to take over the matter. I just checked back in and it looks like there were a couple posts since then, although things still look like this is a makemkv bug (for the blu-ray version of the movie some of us have). Is there anything further I need to provide? I'm not very well versed in the technical aspects (I'm really just a user) but I'll do what I can to help improve the product.

[Chetwood]

Is there anything further I need to provide?

You mean other than what I'v already been suggesting?

[dcoke22]

The subtitles from Avatar's forced subs track.

[MickM]

Thanks dcoke22 - glad you knew how to do that

[Chetwood]

Thanks dcoke22 - glad you knew how to do that

I already told you how to do that:

You could open the correct playlist (check with BDInfo) in TSMuxer and demux the subtitle track and upload it (zipped with a password) to Mega or something so people can check it out.

but now that dcoke22 has done this for you we can see that the US BD's subs are different from the German BD's cause they contain (SPEAKING NA'VI). Easy fix: replace all instances in the SRT and mux the stream into the MKV with MKVToolnix setting the track flags to forced yes.

[dcoke22]

What MickM is attempting to do here is indicate that with this particular title, MakeMKV is producing erroneous results. It seems indicative of a bug in MakeMKV. The best outcome would be for MakeMKV to be fixed for everyone.

BDInfo (https://github.com/UniqProject/BDInfo), seems to be a Windows-only program, but the OP stated he was using a Mac.

[Chetwood]

Right, I was suggesting a workaround cause short of uploading the entire disc as ISO I'm afraid people won't be able to reproduce this effect faithfully. He could upload a short clip of 00002.m2ts from 4:33 to 4:56 where Na'vi is spoken, using TSMuxer's Split & Cut function (dropping all unnecessary tracks like audio to keep it small, should be around 60 MB). However, even if MakeMKV handles this clip gracefully there might still be issues with the full disc's authoring that MakeMKV can't handle. I find it weird though that this hasn't been mentioned earlier on the forums since the movie is from 2009.

[preserve]

I find it weird though that this hasn't been mentioned earlier on the forums since the movie is from 2009.

I guess because enough of us bought different releases and didn’t run into the problem, with both old and new versions of MakeMKV as I confirmed above.

[Chetwood]

I guess because enough of us bought different releases and didn’t run into the problem, with both old and new versions of MakeMKV as I confirmed above.

So, does anyone know how many releases exist, and why? Probably money, right? I guess the industry just hopes to sell the same movie over again, currently it's on 4K.

BDInfo (https://github.com/UniqProject/BDInfo), seems to be a Windows-only program, but the OP stated he was using a Mac.

BDinfo can help to determine the right playlist but in this particular case he does not need it, TSMuxer is enough. Still, I expected something like WINE to exist for Macs, haven't bothered to verify this though.