Question concerning subtitles in English Language films

[Danathar]

If somebody can point me to where this has been asked before I'd greatly appreciate it (if so).

I ripped the movie "Patton" that I purchased for my home media center. Most of the film is in english except when the Germans talk. How do I set makemkv so that the english subtitles only come on when the non-english speakers talk (like it was when the film was released in the theaters)?

thanks ahead of time for the help!

[Woodstock]

Before you look at how to set up MakeMKV, check your player, first - the software used by Uebo and Seagate (amongst others) defaults to ALWAYS showing you the first subtitle stream, and you have to turn it off for each file played. I haven't found an menu setting to change this behavior on either unit.

The subtitles for German in Patton may be part of the picture itself, and the subtitles for everything else coming from the subtitle stream. If disabling subtitles still shows the subtitles for the German sections, they're part of the picture.

For better control over subtitles from DVDs (and 90+% of my stuff is subtitled and/or dubbed), I run the MKV files through Handbrake to both shrink them and allow me to choose which audio and subtitle tracks are likely to be chosen by the player. The "forced" subtitles (like the German in your case) are not always the first track. VLC lets me look at the MKV files with and without subs, so I can make the choices when I run things through Handbrake.

[Chetwood]

No need to use Handbrake. Once you've verified the German items are not hardcoded you can simply use MKVToolnix's header editor to flag the stream to forced. Check the MakeMKV GUI, each stream has a forced stream below it that extracts only items marked as forced into a separate stream. Select this one and set it to forced in MKVToolnix.

[paulster]

Check the MakeMKV GUI, each stream has a forced stream below it that extracts only items marked as forced into a separate stream. Select this one and set it to forced in MKVToolnix.

This is true in most instances but a lot of films also seem to do forced subtitles the DVD way, which is to use software to switch them on, so they exist as a separate subtitle track that isn't shown as forced and doesn't have any subtitles with a forced flag within it. I've found half a dozen of these just this last week or so.

I guess the people doing the authoring have come from a DVD background in these cases and have their own ways of doing it, so carry on even though BluRay provides an automatic means for this.

If you find more than one English subtitle track listed then I'd recommend ripping them all and then identifying the track which is genuinely the forced subtitles and setting the 'forced' flag on this track. It could be one that MakeMKV doesn't signify as a forced track because it can't know that the authors have written into the playback software.

[Chetwood]

Actually, also on DVDs its possible to have one subtitle stream which has all items only some of which are flagged as forced.

[Danathar]

All very good replies. Going to look into all of the suggestions. Thanks!

One thing I noticed on "A bridge to Far" which has the same issue as "Patton" (Germans getting subtitled in English). In that one, it's rather strange. There are TWO subtitle tracks for English. One for the entire film and one that works ONLY when Germans are talking and a second that does it for the entire film. I just excluded the english subtitle track that worked for the entire film and included the second english subtitle track.

Patton did not do it that way, so I was unsure how to approach it.

[Chetwood]

Actually that's preferable. Have one stream with forced subs only and one with all subs. Set the forced to forced and be done with it.