Changing Default Subtitle

[SljivovitzDino]

Howdy

When ripping this 4K, the playback contains Japanese subtitles by default since its first in the list and contains the default flag (as highlighted in yellow).
Setting the default MKV flag to the English Forced doesn't change the behaviour, as the Japanese subtitles is still selected by default and appears on playback.
Which title should be set to default as I don't want either Japanese or English subtitles to appear (other than English Forced)?

2024-01-21 00_46_08-MakeMKV BETA.png (21.2 KiB) Viewed 2727 times

Thanks for your help.

-SD

[Nucleus]

I don't want either Japanese or English subtitles to appear (other than English Forced)?

After you have played your rip and determined which is the forced stream you want on, remux (multiplex) that rip forcing the chosen stream on by default.

Eg: Say for arguments sake it's the second subtitle stream, in MKVToolnix you need to flag that stream as default and forced. Without this getting too complex it's also possible to set those flags in MKVToolnix Header editor but just use MKVToolNix GUI if you're not familiar with this stuff. Quick example screenshot below.

btw: Don't expect (all) players to respect MKV flags - annoyingly!

PowerDVD, MPC-BE and VLC in Windows will all respect this forced stream correctly. However, I use Vimu player on my Firestick 4K to stream from my NAS and annoyingly it doesn't respect MKV default/forced flags correctly, been in touch with the author about it just recently and sent example vid with flags set correctly, not heard back yet. Also found that some TV's USB media players don't respect default/forced flags.

As a sidenote, pretty much essential to be familiar with muxing/remuxing with MKVToolNix if you're into ripping.

Code: Select all

https://mkvtoolnix.download/

[Chetwood]

Which title should be set to default as I don't want either Japanese or English subtitles to appear (other than English Forced)?

- Enable Expert Mode under Preferences > General
- set Advanced > Default Selection rule to:

Code: Select all

-sel:all,+sel:(eng|nolang),-sel:(core),-10:(forced*(eng))

which should tick all English tracks and mux the English forced sub (if present and recognized as such!) at the top of the list.

If the file is already muxed you can select MKVToolnix's header editor to set the flags to default/forced without having to remux the entire file.

[SljivovitzDino]

Thanks Nucleus & Chetwood for your help.

In the end, all I really had to do was follow this post to change the order weight:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=31815

The default order weight was 90 for all subtitles, so I changed the Eng and Eng Forced weight to 89 giving them priority.
As soon as I did this, the Eng Forced became the 'default' as shown for the MKV Flags.
MPC-BE now shows Eng as the first subtitle (previously it was showing Japanese as the first) and the titles come up as English.

2024-01-23 21_37_33-MakeMKV BETA.png (24.07 KiB) Viewed 2605 times

[Chetwood]

Yeah, well the forced selection rule I posted from memory does this without the GUI. If subtitles really start with a weight of 90, -11 would achive the same result. I'm glad you got it working though.