General problems with subtitles

[de7t1ny]

After creating different MKV files from BluRay discs I am not able to demux the subtitles.
All Programs I tried say that they dont support the format of the subtitles: tsMuxerGUI, MKVextractGUI, MKVExtractGUI2

So i guess the problem is like MediaInfo says that the subtitles are "S_HDMV/PGS" and not "PGS" like e.g. m2ts files?

Am I doing something wrong?

[de7t1ny]

So what I really would like to do is to see the content of the subtitles. So i was hoping being able to open the subtitles with Subtitle Processsor or Subtitle Workshop.

Can anybody please tell me how to do that? Thank you so much.

[Woodstock]

MKVToolnix seems to have no problem extracting the PGS subtitle tracks from MKV files. Have you tried that?

[de7t1ny]

MKVextractGUI, MKVExtractGUI2 are GUI for MKVToolnix (therefore you have to place them in the MKVToolnix folder).
So that would confuse me even more if MKVToolnix works for them but not the GUIs?

How are you (Woodstock) using the MKVToolnix?

[Woodstock]

I've really only been using the mkvmerge portion, which has properly pulled the PGS tracks and copied them to the new files.

I just tried the extract GUI and, although it claimed the extract was a success, the PGS tracks were not created.

Of course, I also tried extracting the video track from a 5GB MKV ripped from a BD and got a 78MB h264 file, so something is very screwy with my copy!

[Chetwood]

What happens when you try to extract them with MKVCleaver? Use all tracks even if you need only some.

[Romansh]

So i guess the problem is like MediaInfo says that the subtitles are "S_HDMV/PGS" and not "PGS" like e.g. m2ts files?

No, that's the proper MKV codec ID for Blu-ray subtitles.

[de7t1ny]

What happens when you try to extract them with MKVCleaver? Use all tracks even if you need only some.

1. Thanks a lot Chetwood! MKVCleaver seems to work!
Besides, thats even more confusing since MKVCleaver is also a MKVtoolnix GUI! Can anybody explain why this GUI works and the others dont?

2. Still I would appreciate an answer from some MakeMKV developer why MakeMKV changes the "PGS" subtitle format of the m2ts to a "S_HDMV/PGS" format in the MKV. What is "S_HDMV" supposed to mean?

[Chetwood]

Why MakeMKV? When you mux an m2ts to mkv with MKVToolnix, Mediainfo also reports S_HDMV/PGS.

[de7t1ny]

Ok, then i guess the "S_HDMV/PGS" is right.

Still there is no hint why the MKVtoolnix GUIs KVextractGUI, MKVExtractGUI2 and even tsMuxerGUI cannot demux the subtitles on MKV files.
Only the MKVtoolnix GUI MKVCleaver is able to do that.

Since MakeMKV even suggests tsMuxerGUI on the "About MKV" webpage this seems strange to me.

[Chetwood]

I've seen this issue pop up rarely too and my guess is that it's related to MakeMKV "deleting" forced sub tracks that turned out to be empty after parsing the entire file. This appears to result in the track numbering to be off confusing some tools.

[ndjamena]

My advice: don't use MKVExtractGUI2, it get's it's info from MKVInfo, which is a bad idea when track info is moved to the end of a file (and in general, really). As unintuitive as it is, MKVInfo is for developer use only and shouldn't be used for our kind of purposes as it reads the file from beginning to end yet by default stops at the end of the foreward headers. I believe the developer of MKVToolnix must be sick of telling people that by now, yet people still use it. MKVMerge -I, MKVMerge -i or MediaInfo are better options (MediaInfo will be pretty much perfect once the current bug I'm dealing with is fixed).