www.makemkv.com

First of all, greetings. I admit to being a bit of a noob on formats despite moving my owned dvds/blu-rays to my media server.

I have never had occasion to add multiple subtitles to my ripped BluRays until I got Summer Wars and Wolf Children. They both have The Japanese direct translation subs on the first pgs track and the English actor subs on the second, so both are nice to have in the file.

However, when I use makemkv to create a mkv file with both audio and subtitle tracks, both MPC-HC and VLC cannot show the second subtitle track of the output file, even though they know it's Engligh pgs. They're both able to play both audio tracks, just not the second subtitle track. My other BDs seem to generally only have one pgs track, and I've not used makemkv for DVDs, so I don't know if they work correctly in this situation or not. The mkv template is set to WDTV.

I was under the understanding that mkv could pass-through multiple pgs tracks, so I'm confused as to why this isn't working.

Is this a bug/limitation of makemkv or is it in the mkv format, or am I missing something?

It can add as many subtitle tracks as the disc has. You simply have to ensure the ones you want have been checked as it will not check everything by default (unless you change the default, if I recall correctly).

I had selected both subtitle tracks (they were labelled as forced only in makemkv) and when the file is output, MediaInfo says that the file has two pgs subtitle tracks, and the players say that there are two tracks as well, but they just can't seem to be able to display the second subtitle track. No text comes on the screen when it's selected.

Weird.

Which means it has only a few items probably not at the time you're looking at. Extract the sub from the MKV (or m2ts) and open it in BDSUP2SUB.

20 minutes later of getting mkvtoolnix, frontend and sub converter...

Thank you for leading me in the right direction, but the way.

That is odd. I've never before seen an non-selectable (on physical player hardware) subtitle track before. The menus when you play the movie apparently only have the direct translation subs. I was led to believe that the subs were selected based on the language you selected, but apparently didn't watch far enough to catch on before running off to rip it. The second subtitle track is an non-selectable signage and text translation track that must play... all the time?

I've seen signage translation tracks before, but they've always been at least selectable when playing the disc. At least I have the tools if I run across it again in the future.

Thank you for your help.

Subtitles are a pain in the rear end. The "Forced only" flag is actually rather rare; more common is two tracks (sometimes more) per language, one for when you're playing the original language (has everything), the other for when you're playing the dubbed language (only has written stuff like signs, also known as the "forced" subtitles). Sometimes the forced track is the first one, sometimes it's the second one.

Some players will pay attention to the "default" flag for chosing the subtitle track. Others simply play the first one they find, always.