New here, need some help

[stevenmh72]

Hi everyone. I decided to get a flashed USB drive to be able to make backups of discs, including 4K UHD. I tested Attack of the Clones 4K UHD and got an output file that plays. I figured out how to use VLC and MakeMKV to play the disc on the PC. So all good on the hardware setup.

However, I'm not getting subtitles for scenes with alien dialogue on the MKV file. The file structure on the disc is confusing. There are a number of different titles that all appear to be the same thing. I just picked the first one, to include the video, audio, and english subtitles. Here are the screenshots:

Screenshot 2026-03-21 120857.png

Screenshot 2026-03-21 120933.png

How do you figure out what to select to get the subtitles? If this isn't the right subforum to ask this, please direct me to the correct forum.

Thanks

[Woodstock]

I will say this about subtitles - they're not always found where you expect them, especially in popular movies.

I will use the example of Star Trek movies. Some places with obvious alien speech (when Klingons are discussing things), there are no subtitles on the screen; it's only when it is important to know what was said that they appear. This is separate from when they appear in subtitle tracks, as they are often stylized with special fonts on the screen.

In the Star Wars series, a number of alien dialogs also lack translations, if they aren't key to the plot. These also do not appear in the subtitle tracks. It is often the English or other characters REACTION to what is said that "does the translating".

That out of the way, on modern movies, there are often two "local language" subtitle tracks, one the "forced subtitles" (foreign language stuff), and one "everything" (all dialog for us who have trouble hearing nowadays). MakeMKV does not set these tracks to force any of them to appear on playback, for it doesn't have a means to figure that out, other than what is on the disk itself... which is often ambiguous.

Typically, I rip EVERY track, then use VLC to help me isolate the ones I want, then use handbrake to include those in the proper order when I compress the video. I then run the result through MKVtoolnix to tag the tracks with "default" and "forced" flags, so players will display the "proper" subtitle track when played.

[Christmazz]

I, like Woodstock, will rip every English track then open the MKV file with MediaInfo where if you look at the subtitles in the MKV, you will see a line that says "Count of elements" which seems to be all the characters for that subtitle. Generally I've found the forced subtitles (foreign language subtitles) have extremely low Count of elements compared to the main subtitles making it easier to find and retag with MKVToolNix. I've also found, it seems Handbrake does not over the "Count of elements" metadata from the original MKV so if you open the Handbraked file, the "Count of elements" line isn't there.

[Woodstock]

(just a note to say, language tracks are not always labeled correctly. I had one series where the "all subtitles" track was tagged as Japanese language, despite being English. My guess is the author only expected it to be used if someone select Japanese as the audio language, especially since the text did not quite match what the spoken English was.)

[stevenmh72]

Thanks everyone. I found a forum that discusses the Star Wars discs. The alien subtitles are baked into the video, no subtitles needed, but it's a matter of picking the right title. It's not the first one in this case. Once I ripped the correct title the subtitles for aliens showed up. But the info here may end up useful for me on other discs.