Ripping a DVD with forced subtitles

[xoubie]

Hey guys, I'm starting to create a home media server and have tarted ripping all my DVD's to stream over my own server. I've been using MakeMKV to rip the DVDs and Handbrake to convert them into MP4 files. However I'm running into this reoccurring issue of Forced subtitles. I know MakeMKV can't find forced subtitles on DVD's for some odd reason and I've sen a few suggestions to use DBSup2Sub to get the forced subtitles then put it all together. I've tried this several times and every time the software tells me that it has discovered 0 forced tracks. I'm at my wits end. I have no idea what to do from this point onwards as everything online points me to dodgy software that I must pay for. Has anyone figured out a way of doing this without DBsup2sub?

[Woodstock]

MakeMKV looks for subtitles. It will try to make a "forced only" subtitle track out of a full track by looking at the flags... and VERY FEW disks have flagged-as-forced subtitles in tracks. They'll have a separate track JUST for the forced subtitles, and it will be tied to the main audio track of the disk.

But MakeMKV will not flag that track as "forced" unless it is the FIRST subtitle track. Sometimes, that happens. Other times, it doesn't.

The DVD version of the anime series "Bleach" has a SINGLE subtitle track; none are flagged as "forced", so you either have subtitles, or you don't. MakeMKV looks for forced subtitles and finds none.

Other titles have multiple subtitle tracks... a forced track for English, a full track for English, and other tracks as well One of the star wars disk had a LOT, with some of them being "forced" in English and other languages.

My best bet has been to extract all the subtitle tracks found, and view a segment of the title to see what's what. THEN I tell handbrake what to put where to make it "friendly" to the players.

And I still have to use mkvtoolnix to flag the "correct" track.

[Chetwood]

Since MakeMKV can't recognize forced items inside DVD tracks you'd have to extract the track that you suspect of containing them and then use BDSUP2SUB to extract those items into a separate track to be manually muxed into the mkv with MKVToolnix.