Extracting subtitles

[Chetwood]

A little bit off-topic but since Mike is reading this thread: do you have any plans to have MakeMKV detect forced subtitles by track size as is done by multiAVCHD?

[jgirot]

Sorry, just hearing about CCExtractor support in MakeMKV. I've been using CCExtractor for a couple years to get CC from older DVDS. This is a great development for MakeMKV!

You mentioned the alternate output formats from CCExtractor:

I believe this won't give the outcome needed (preserve screen positioning of the subtitles), since CCExtractor just don't support it.

It absolutely does. It can even output "raw" format - a fixed matrix with characters and attributes (color/bold/italic etc) for each position.

Any way we can get the binary/raw CCextractor format as separate file (or attachment to the MKV)?

I like to use SRT, but I also do the SPUPNG to generate VOB style subtitles. It's a lot easier for me to have CCextractor output the bin/raw file once and then I do two or three different output formats from that (WebVTT anyone?). Having the bin/raw format can be "future-proofing" because it captures all of the CC information. My experience is that the bin file is < 1MB for an hour of video. They compress well too, about the same level as SRT.

If anyone's interested I have procedure for generating the VobSub through SPUPNG that does not require muxing with the video file first.

[mike admin]

Any way we can get the binary/raw CCextractor format as separate file (or attachment to the MKV)?

Sort of.

You can get it right now. Conversion to text is an option of conversion profile that is enabled by default. You can change conversion profile (see comments in default.mmcp.xml) to get raw binary data (what is fed to ccextractor) as a separate MKV track. Currently there is no support for this track type in any tools. The author of mkvtoolnix is usually very responsive, and if you make your case there is a big chance that this format support will be added to mkvtoolnux demuxer, so one could extract the raw track into bin file. For now you'll have to hack something on your own...

[Chetwood]

The author of mkvtoolnix is usually very responsive

Which is very nice...

[Ripman]

As an FYI regarding CCs:

If you’re using the MKVToolnix GUI or mkvextract or mkvmerge to mux CCs that have been converted to srt => be sure to use the “engage keep whitespace” option to preserve fixed-width text subs. I asked Mosu to change that about 6 months ago specifically for CCs. (Tbh - it doesn’t have the effect I had been hoping for, like positioning subs near speakers. This mostly due to players not using fixed-width fonts.) First stable version the option is in is mkvtoolnix-64-bit-74.0.0.7z.

Yes Mosu is very responsive- also very excellent sw alongside MakeMKV.