MKV / SRT Issue

[LEFEUFOLLET]

I've been using MakeMKV for ages and it's a superb program! I've got one issue though, which hopefully someone might shed some light on...

With foreign language films, I use Subtitle Edit to make .srt subtitles from an .mkv made with MakeMKV. This is so that I can correct spelling mistakes, etc. However, the duration of some of the lines in the .srt seem to default to a length of 5 seconds. I can only assume that this is an issue with the blu-ray to .mkv conversion in MakeMKV, as this issue never occurs on the DVD copy of a dual format release when I use MakeMKV and Subtitle Edit in the same way, and when I've tried ByteCopy to make an .srt direct from the blu-ray disc I don't get this issue either. I'd much prefer to keep using Subtitle Edit as it's the best program from those I've tried...

Has anyone else had the same problem? And can anyone suggest any way to resolve this issue?

[Chetwood]

I'm pretty sure MakeMKV does not touch the time codes. You can verify this by extracting the sub from the source and from the MKV and compare them in BDSUP2SUB.

[Devore]

SubtitleEdit has many options to do with fixing timings, one of which enforces a minimum duration, perhaps you have that checked?

[Woodstock]

I remember there being discussion a couple of years ago here about a lot of PGS subtitles not having end times on them. Instead, they simply replaced the frame with a blank one.

It came up because it caused trouble when dealing with the "forced only" flag; a forced subtitle would be put up, but never expire, because there was no expiration time. It was normally cleared by an empty subtitle frame, which did NOT have the forced flag.

[Romansh]

I remember there being discussion a couple of years ago here about a lot of PGS subtitles not having end times on them.

That would be 100% of them. They're either cleared by a blank subtitle or by the next subtitle.

As for forced subtitles, the trickiest situation is when a forced subtitle is cleared by a non-blank, non-forced subtitle. HandBrake modifies said subtitle to make it "blank", and IIRC current versions of MakeMKV include any subsequent non-blank subtitles (plus the first blank subtitle) in order to avoid modifying subtitle packets.

[Woodstock]

Ah, new data inserted into brain database!

So, Subtitle Edit is simply putting in 5 seconds in the SRT, because the SRT needs an end time. Hopefully, that answers LEFEUFOLLET question..

[LEFEUFOLLET]

Many thanks for all the information. It helps in that I now understand why this issue is occuring, but it doesn't help resolve the issue. I've checked SubtitleEdit and I can't find any settings to do with duration when importing a subtitle.

At the moment, I'm doing subtitles via MakeMKV and SubtitleEdit still just to get the start times and then am finding .srt files online and syncing them to the correct blu-ray times (if there isn't a properly timed .srt already available). Unfortunately, companies in different countries can use different translations, so this can be problematic...

[ndjamena]

I've never had that issue, are you extracting the subtitles first with MKVExtract or are you reading them directly from the MKVs?

I always extract first, maybe SubtitleEdit simply can't read from MKVs properly. It shouldn't take any longer to extract them into a separate file then it does to read them directly into the program (plus if it's in it's own file and you screw up you don't have to read through the entire file a second time).

[LEFEUFOLLET]

ndjamena - I was reading them directly into MakeMKV. I've used MKVExtract a couple of times over the last few days and your method has worked perfectly, so many thanks for the information!

[ndjamena]

It's looks like the thread was spammed. I'll just leave a dummy post, otherwise we won't be able to wipe the thread from our unread lists.

(hopefully this works)

((yup ))