Subtitle->Text English (Lossy Conversion)

[swampdaddy]

While ripping my personal Friends DVDs to be used via Plex, I can see that one of the Subtitle choices shows as: "Subtitle->Text English (Lossy Conversion)". What is this exactly? What's the significance of having this box checked?

Thanks,

Rob

Screen Shot 2019-06-18 at 9.49.18 PM.png (30.15 KiB) Viewed 21468 times

[Atra1n2]

CC would lead me to believe it's closed captioning. I have ran across this on some of my DVDs recently as well, and they will not rip with this track selected. The other subtitles are fine, but so far these CC subtitle have given me issues.

[Woodstock]

What Atra1n2 said...

Closed Caption capture is a relatively new feature in MakeMKV, which is having a rocky start. CC isn't a "traditional" subtitle track, in that it is attached to the video track, not on its own.

MakeMKV uses a program called ccextractor to pull it out, and convert it to an SRT-type subtitle, which a lot of players can play (but not all). ccextractor needs to be on your system; if it isn't (or it's not where MakeMKV expects it to be) and you've selected the CC subtitles, the rip will fail.

Per this post, Windows and Mac versions of MakeMKV come with ccextractor, but the Linux version does NOT.

[bkontrarian]

I ran into the same situation when ripping my Seinfeld DVDs.
Is there a way for MakeMKV to keep (lossless) the substation alpha without converting it to SRT?
I prefer the SSA text to the VOB subs and the conversion to SRT losses screen placement.
For example, in the beginning of episodes when there are credits on the screen, SRT will overlay the subtitle on top of the existing text making it difficult to read.
The SSA CC text will position it at the top of the screen so it's readable.
This is also very common with PGS on Bluray where the PGS will make sure the subtitles don't interfere with other text that's hardcoded into the video and SRT will not.
For the time being, I am extractiong the CC separately from the MakeMKV process and then having to remux it back it.
Not a big deal for a movie but when your doing 100s of episodes, that extra step is very time consuming.
If MakeMKV could make an option to keep the CC losslessly than it could easily be done in one step!

[swampdaddy]

I'm able to rip with no problem with this CC selected. I'm still not sure what it does.... From what I can tell, Closed Captions on DVDs are carried in a special data channel of the MPEG-2 video stream... so, what part of this situation is "Lossy"?

[bkontrarian]

It converts it to SRT and thus loses the data that determines where it is positioned on the screen.
It would need to be losslessly converted to substation alpha to keep the positioning.
Programs like Handbrake can do this but obviously with Handbrake you are forces to transcode the video.
Hopefully with MakeMKV, someone ripping their Seinfeld and Friends DVDs could do a lossless remux keeping the original mpeg2 video, ac3 audio, and gob and CC subs.
That's what I do now, but it just takes an extra step since MakeMKV forces the CC to be converted to SRT.
The CC subs on these DVDs are way better than the vob subs.

[swampdaddy]

So how do you "do it"? How do you process your STs for best results?

Thanks,

Rob

[bkontrarian]

I use MakeMKV to get a DVDRemux of the episode (mpeg2, ac3, VOB).
Then I rip the same episode with HandBrake using x264 on UltraFast making sure to get the CC608 in the subtitle menu.
I use UltraFast because I don't care about the quality, I just need it to give me a file as fast as possible that I can get the CC608 as substation alpha from.
Then I load the DVDRemux and the HandBrake encode into MKVToolNix.
Deselect the HandBrake encoded video and audio, the remux it.
Now you'll have untouched mpeg2, ac3, VOB, and CC608 in one MKV.

It would be sooooooo awesome if MakeMKV would remux the CC608 to lossless substation alpha instead of lossy SRT.
It's probably pretty low on their list of things to do, if at all.
Maybe one day.

[bkontrarian]

Going to be ripping a bunch of DVDs and noticed that MakeMKV is still using CCExtractor to make lossy SRT subs instead of lossless SSA subs.
Has anyone found a fix for this yet or is this in the works at all?

EDIT: My old method of getting the CC608 subs out as SSA using Handbrake no longer works well since MakeMKV is doing cell trimming when Handbrake doesn't, so the subtitles are no longer synced. Now I need to resync the SSA subs before muxing them into what MakeMKV spits out.