Foreign Language Subtitles

[drjohnnyfever]

Sometimes as a gift I'll receive a blu-ray of a movie I haven't seen yet. A couple times I've converted the disc with MakeMKV/Handbrake, but when I watch the movie I realize there's scenes with a foreign language and I don't get the subtitles because I didn't know to include them in the conversion.

For example, I got "Winter Soldier" for my birthday and was burned because I didn't know in advance that the early scenes on the ship had subtitled French(?) language. Not having seen the movie in theatres, I had no idea.

So... is there an online forum somewhere that I could check before converting a blu-ray to see if there are scenes with foreign language? When I 'google' it, the results usually are regarding closed-captioning or complete foreign subtitles (meaning the whole movie is subtitled... not just certain scenes).

If not... I just got "X-Men: Days of Future Past" but didn't see it in theatres. Can anyone tell me if it has foreign subtitles? If so, can anyone tell me a chapter number so I can test different tracks in Handbrake without having to convert the whole movie?

Thanks

[Woodstock]

You probably have the subtitle tracks, but your player can't play them. BD uses a format called "PGS", which is not universally supported.

By default, MakeMKV will rip all subtitle tracks into the MKV file.

What are you using to play the MKV files?

[drjohnnyfever]

I know that MakeMKV is ripping all the subtitle tracks into the MKV file. However, I'm then taking the MKV file and running it through Handbrake to make an HD m4v file for my AppleTV.

And there's the problem. I need to manually select the subtitle track for Handbrake to embed it. However, if I haven't seen the movie in theatres I don't know if I need to select a subtitle track (and there doesn't seem to be a "catch-all" method of selecting in Handbrake).

So maybe I need to rephrase my question. Is there a way of looking at the files MakeMKV creates in the backup folder and knowing if one of them is a foreign language subtitle track?

[And to clarify again... I'm talking about subtitles that appear ONLY when a foreign language is spoken in certain scenes. I'm not talking about subtitling the entire movie for hearing impaired purposes.]

[ndjamena]

If one of the forced subtitle tracks is still in the output file then that SHOULD be what you're looking for.

Other than that, you can try extracting the subtitle streams and looking at them using at subtitle editor or remuxing the file with MKVMerge and looking at the "Number of Frames" tags should give you a hint as to their contents.

[drjohnnyfever]

If one of the forced subtitle tracks is still in the output file then that SHOULD be what you're looking for.

Sorry for not understanding... in my backup folder, where would I look for these tracks?

[Woodstock]

Then you're really looking for support for Handbrake, which is available at forum.handbrake.fr ...

MP4 files do not support Bluray subtitles, except as burned in. If you are using the "release" version of handbrake, you're a year out of date, because the nightly builds support BD much better.

When you go to burn the subtitles in, you have to chose whether you want "all" or "only forced", and then you have to determine WHICH subtitle track is the right one for your needs. Handbrake can try to find the forced track by using its "Foreign Audio Search" selection, if you select "Forced only".

But, beyond that, you really need to be asking over on handbrake.fr ... And they'll want logs (information on how to get those is in red boxes all over the place).

Subtitle tracks will be embedded in the video files.

[theOtherDave]

I also encountered this issue in the blu-ray of "The Winter Soldier". It's even more annoying than described - in several recent blu-rays, including "The Winter Soldier", English subtitles for non-English dialogue (i.e. subs that should be labeled "English forced only" are listed as just "English" (not "forced').

Because of this, whenever I encode blu-rays now, I routinely select ALL the English subs, both regular and forced, just in case of mislabeled subtitle tracks. I de-select all the other subtitle tracks. Then when I process the very large mkv files into much more compact mp4s with HandBrake (I use the current nightly builds of HB), I select only one of the subtitle tracks by quickly previewing several different scenes in the mkv file to find foreign language dialogue, either with Handbrake's preview function or by a quick look with VLC. It's annoying and a bit tedious, but it works.

[drjohnnyfever]

It's even more annoying than described...

Yes it is! I think the worst Blu-ray I've encoded is Avengers in terms of the correct subtitle track being hidden amongst other subtitle tracks. At least I'd seen Avengers in the theatre so I knew what scene to check in the preview.

[Woodstock]

If you think Avengers is a "worst offender", you will find even worse out there.

For the last week, I've been ripping disks where the multiple "English" subtitle tracks are a mix between Chinese, English, and Malay... and which one is first varies from disk to disk. One set had 6 different "English" tracks, and the proper one to match the English audio track was #3. And in no case are any of them tagged as "forced".

Easiest way to deal with things is to rip them all, use VLC or a similar program to find out which one(s) are "right", then have Handbrake deal with tossing out the others.

[theOtherDave]

...
I just got "X-Men: Days of Future Past" but didn't see it in theatres. Can anyone tell me if it has foreign subtitles? If so, can anyone tell me a chapter number so I can test different tracks in Handbrake without having to convert the whole movie?

Thanks

I happen to be encoding that one right now - haven't watched the whole thing yet but there is definitely some non-English dialogue in Chapter 17 ( about 1:19:36 before the end of the movie). Vietnamese & French afaict. According to MakeMKV, there are four English subtitle tracks. One is empty, one is all the dialogue including spoken English, and two appear to be the same - English Forced only subtitles.

[drjohnnyfever]

Awesome! Thanks for letting me know

[ndjamena]

...
I just got "X-Men: Days of Future Past" but didn't see it in theatres. Can anyone tell me if it has foreign subtitles? If so, can anyone tell me a chapter number so I can test different tracks in Handbrake without having to convert the whole movie?

Thanks

I happen to be encoding that one right now - haven't watched the whole thing yet but there is definitely some non-English dialogue in Chapter 17 ( about 1:19:36 before the end of the movie). Vietnamese & French afaict. According to MakeMKV, there are four English subtitle tracks. One is empty, one is all the dialogue including spoken English, and two appear to be the same - English Forced only subtitles.

Were the two forced subtitles from different subtitle tracks in the original source or was one of them a forced track extracted from another track? If there were only 2 actual English subtitle tracks in the original title then "X-Men: Days of Future Past" seems kind of tame.

[theOtherDave]

...
Were the two forced subtitles from different subtitle tracks in the original source or was one of them a forced track extracted from another track? If there were only 2 actual English subtitle tracks in the original title then "X-Men: Days of Future Past" seems kind of tame.

I may misunderstand the question or be using terminology differently or incorrectly- not sure. There were four English subtitle tracks (according to MakeMKV). Two tracks were listed as "English forced only" and two were listed as just "English". MakeMKV output reported that one of the English forced-only subtitle tracks was empty was not added to the mkv output. Of the three remaining subtitle tracks in the mkv output file, one consisted of English subtitles for all the dialogue, both English and non-English, as would be desired by a hearing-impaired person. The other two subtitle tracks appear to be identical and consist of English translations of non-English dialogue ( i.e. tracks that should both be identified as English forced only). Each subtitle track has numerous individual subtitles, corresponding to different scenes & lines of dialogue.

[ndjamena]

That just means there were only two English subtitles on the actual Blu Ray. In an MT2S file the forced and regular subtitles are kept in the same track, since the Matroska container can't have forced and regualar subtitles in one track MakeMKV has to separate the subtitles flagged as "forced" from the rest and put them into their own tracks. Since it doesn't know which tracks contain forced subtitles it automatically assigns a secondary subtitle track to all subtitle tracks in the file just in case. If it turns out any of the subtitle tracks don't contain forced subtitles at the end of processing, it's companion subtitles track remains empty and MakeMKV will remove the reference to it from the header.

What you have is one track with English subtitles, none of which are marked as forced and one track with English Translations, all of which were marked as forced. So you wound up with one companion track that turned out empty and was removed from the file and one that simply became a duplicate of it's parent.

[whatgoeshere]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... sp=sharing