Forced Subtitles on DVDs

[b69ca]

Hello,

I know this topic has been discussed a great deal in these forums and I believe I've read almost all threads but still can't pinpoint what I'm looking for.

I have ripped most of my movie collection from DVD to MKV using MakeMKV and for the most part had no problems. Some movies have sections where forced subtitles would be displayed but for some reason, none of my MKVs seem to play the forced subtitles.

As an example, The Boondock Saints 2 has a couple of sections with people speaking in Spanish. If I turn on subtitles, I see the translation however subtitles are on for the entire movie at that point.

Using mkvmerge -i file.mkv i see 2 subtitle tracks which were obtained during the ripping process.
Using mkvextract tracks file.mkv 4:sub1.srt 5:sub2.srt I can successfully export the subtitle tracks from the MKV

The issue is however that for the most part, both of these tracks look the same. The IDX file for example doesn't seem to contain any CLEAR commands which I would expect for forced subtitles?

Am I doing something wrong? Should I be doing something else when I rip my DVDs?

I'm fine with having to pump the MKV through mkvtoolsnix to mark the relevant track as forced however I don't believe the tracks i'm exporting are the forced types?

Hopefully I'm making some sense in what I'm asking and someone can get the gist.

Many thanks in advance for any help...

[Smithcraft]

You could try a dedicated subtitle program like Subtitle Edit, and see if it has forced subs, or if the forced subs are in a dedicated track.

SC

[b69ca]

Hi Guys,

I could really use some help with this one as I simply can't get past this issue. Ripping the DVD of Olympus has Fallen and I simply can't get the forced subtitles to show without having all subtitles on.

The disc analysis shows 6 tracks for the main (16 chapter movie) -

Video Mpeg2
Audio DD 3/2+1 English
Audio DD 3/2+1 English
Subtitles English
Subtitles English
Subtitles Spanish

When I create my MKV I am sure to include all of the English tracks however when playing back (on VLC or other players), neither of the subtitle tracks are forced only. The first is a straight forward subtitle track and the second is for hard of hearing.

I suspect after reading MANY posts on the forum that individual subtitles have a forced flag however the various players can't handle that for MKV files, would that sound reasonable.

The solution I seem to have read was to extract the subtitle track using MakeMKV with the 'forced only' option checked however I don't seem to be able to find that option. I'm using MakeMKV for OS X, is that option present in that OS?

Can anyone please offer some advice or point me in the right direction, hopefully I'm doing something wrong as I can't believe I'm the only person with this issue on DVDs?

Thanks in advance.
J

[Woodstock]

On a DVD, I do not think you have a "forced only" flag, like you do on Bluray. So, you're stuck with what the track has.

And, what I have seen on most BD disks is that the FO flag is not used, at least, not if there is also a DVD release of the title. Forced subtitles are assigned their own track, rather than using the flag.

[b69ca]

So first off, let me apologize if I mus-understand your reply however my observation is slightly different.

I have a number of movies from DVD which have their own dedicated track for forced subtitles and in this case, this scenario works perfectly for me. Where this is the case, I can simply choose the dedicated track and enable subtitles - everything is perfect.

In the case of the DVD mentioned earlier however, there is no separate track. Of the two subtitle tracks, the first is the regular English subtitles (VobSub format) and the second is the same subtitles but with the additional extra bits for the visually impaired.

Now, here is the interesting part. If I export the regular English subtitle track (using mkvedit) and open it using subtitleedit (http://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit) I can select an option to only show the sections of the track that are marked as forced. When I do this, I see the forced only subtitles. The problem is that various players don't recognize that option correctly.

If I edit the header of the mkv and mark the forced flag for the track, VLC plays the entire subtitle track as-is, with all the dialog subtitled. XBMC on the other hand appears to recognize the track correctly and only play the forced only parts of the track. The challenge there however is that in XBMC-land, you loose the full English subtitle track, or so is my observation.

From my experience, DVDs are created in a number of different ways when it comes to forced subtitles, some have separate tracks, some have them already burned into the movie and others (especially recent releases) seem to have individual dialog marked as forced in the subtitle tracks.

Does this make sense? At this stage, I'm looking for clarification that my observations are correctly and hopefully I can get to a solution.

Many thanks!
J

[b69ca]

So while I am waiting for a post I wrote prior to this one to be approved, I have some more strangeness.

So on the DVD mentioned, it would appear that as said, there are 2 English subtitle tracks, one is the regular English subtitle track and the other is for the visually impaired. While the DVD does not have a separate forced subtitles track, individual dialog is marked as forced within the regular English subtitle track - I observed this by using subtitleedit.

Now here is the strangeness....

When I ripped the DVD using MakeMKV, then playing the movie through XBMC, I would not get any forced subtitles. I could turn on subtitles and select the English track, but this however would show subtitles for all dialog.

Initially, I used the mkvtoolnix suite to mark the English subtitle track as forced, and this seemed to work. Various other tests however lead me down a different path.

It appears that if I simply run the MKV that MakeMKV produced through mkvmerge, it fixes the forced subtitles issue and the resulting file then displays the individual forced dialog from the main stream. I do not need to have the stream marked as forced, nor do I need to have it enabled - it seems as though the mkvmerge process did something with the forced dialog and correctly addressed it.

Has this behavior been observed?

Does mkvmerge do something different than MakeMKV?

Thanks!
J

[b69ca]

Just adding to this so that people don't waste too much time. I'm no longer certain that this is a problem with MakeMKV but rather the players such as VLC and XBMC (on OpenElec).

I do actually believe that MakeMKV is taking the subtitle tracks as it is supposed to and actually the players are struggling with tracks that have embedded forced dialog.

I need to do some more troubleshooting but will be sure to update for completeness.

[Chetwood]

On a DVD, I do not think you have a "forced only" flag, like you do on Bluray.

I'm pretty sure you do. I've seen DVDs with only one sub per language that still has some forced subs. How else would they do it if not by flagging only some of the items as forced? Dunno if MakeMKV will recognize them though.

[Romansh]

On a DVD, I do not think you have a "forced only" flag, like you do on Bluray.

I'm pretty sure you do.

Yep, individual subtitle packets can be flagged as forced too. You just have a "forced start display" command (0x00) instead of a regular "start display" command (0x01).

[Woodstock]

Now you know why I said, "I do not think you have..."

It may exist, but I have not seen it used in over 600 bilingual DVDs I've got in my collection. The forced subtitles are either separate tracks, or there is no differentiation.

MakeMKV only offers to try differentiating between "normal" and "forced" for BDs, which is why I came to that conclusion.