Two sets of forced English subtitles?

[exonouroboros]

While I'm sure forced subtitles have been a discussion countless times before, I am just baffled by the options and what I can even do as sometimes there are two sets of English subtitles. Testing in PowerDVD seems to show that the second set is the same set of subtitles, except they're shown at the top of the video instead of the bottom. However what am I to choose then if I want a set of forced and full? In this case, I am ripping the movie Akira. I have attached a picture of the current options here.

What players are actually capable of showing forced subtitles? Akira may not be the best example, but what would I choose in the case of a movie like District 9 if I want both full and forced? Do I just choose both like the picture I've attached? Thanks.

[Woodstock]

"Forced subtitles" is a grey subject. While both DVD and BD standards have ways that you can flag certain titles in a track as "forced", my experience has been that most multi-language disks will have separate tracks for "forced (signs only)" and "all" subtitle tracks.

There are prominent exceptions - Avatar makes extensive use of the "forced" flag for the native language subtitles.

Akira is published by a company I have no experience with yet (Honneamise), so I can't give you any guidance on that, but MANY of the big publishers of Anime use two tracks for subtitles, one forced, for when you use English audio, the other with everything. Others, such as Viz Media, only use one track, with nothing tagged as "forced", so you don't get to read signs unless you turn everything on.

On Funimation titles, it's interesting to turn the full track on to compare it to the dub...

As for MakeMKV - when ripping a BD title, it will offer a "forced only" track for each subtitle track, which (in theory) will have only the subtitles within that track that were flagged as "forced". This mostly works for titles like Avatar, but anime titles have, in my experience so far, always come up as the forced track being empty, and MakeMKV removes it after the rip.

[exonouroboros]

As for MakeMKV - when ripping a BD title, it will offer a "forced only" track for each subtitle track, which (in theory) will have only the subtitles within that track that were flagged as "forced". This mostly works for titles like Avatar, but anime titles have, in my experience so far, always come up as the forced track being empty, and MakeMKV removes it after the rip.

Right, that's been my experience so far as well. MakeMKV always shows them as empty, but on some series I've tried (Full Metal Panic!) the second set of subtitles is what the forced should be, as in subtitles for the opening and closing songs. That would be fine, but it doesn't end up as being "forced." I'll keep looking into this.

[Woodstock]

Reversing the full/forced subtitle sets is quite common, I'm afraid. I have to check everything before running them through Handbrake. I let MakeMKV rip the files, then run one them through VLC to see which track is the correct forced set, and run Handbrake accordingly.

And I do go through handbrake on all but the 3D stuff, because the video size on both DVD and BD are too big. I've not STOPPED going to MP4, though, because I got a player that works with PGS subtitles in MKV files.... Something you can't do with MP4.