How do you handle multiple Chinese subtitles?

[alumriel]

Hello folks,

Is there any trick to telling one Chinese subtitle from another when ripping a disc? It's not uncommon for discs to have 2-3 Chinese subtitle tracks and I'd prefer to only include the "simplified" version, if possible. Unfortunately, MakeMKV lists them all as "PGS Chinese" with no way to tell one from another, so I end up including all 3. Is there no standard coding for subtitles to differentiate "Traditional" from "Simplified"? (I'm guessing no, else this would have been solved already)

[Woodstock]

MakeMKV will usually offer to create TWO subtitle tracks for each one in the source. The first is "everything in track XX", the second being "only subtitles tagged as FORCED from track XX". The first is simply a copy of the given track; the second will USUALLY end up empty and be deleted.

In general, if there are more than one "main" track for a given language (ignore the FORCED ONLY tracks), they have different content. One is usually "all language foreign to the track's language in the movie". That track will bigger than the other, but you cannot tell that within MakeMKV. The other will be the things not translated in the audio, such as signs and such.

I make use of mkvtoolnix to tag the subtitles as "default" and "forced" to make sure they display properly. MakeMKV's "forced" checkbox isn't quite the same, because it's looking at individual subtitles, rather than a group of them.

And things change if you want MKV or MP4 output from your tools.

[thetoad]

Hello folks,

Is there any trick to telling one Chinese subtitle from another when ripping a disc? It's not uncommon for discs to have 2-3 Chinese subtitle tracks and I'd prefer to only include the "simplified" version, if possible. Unfortunately, MakeMKV lists them all as "PGS Chinese" with no way to tell one from another, so I end up including all 3. Is there no standard coding for subtitles to differentiate "Traditional" from "Simplified"? (I'm guessing no, else this would have been solved already)

the only way to tell is to play the video in something like vlc, picking the individual chinese subtitle (or audio) tracks and see which subtitle/audio track vlc says is being played. then give it a descriptive name.

In both MKV tags and bluray tags, its all just tagged as chinese (same thing with spanish, portuguese and french, when dealing with american varieties of those languages).