Forced subtitle editor

[Chetwood]

So, now you're getting touchy? Dishing out with no comeback is more you like it? Tough luck.

I also can't decide what I find more funny: the fact that you tell me that it's just impossible despite me having done it successfully for the past few years or that you really seem to think I give one damn about your imaginary sense of superiority based on your oh so big expertise. Hilarious.

[ndjamena]

Ignoring the troll and whatever grudge is eating him...

Some of the things to look out for in regards to Subtitles on Blu Rays/DVDs:

• Empty Tracks - this is annoying and pointless, but it happens. Sometimes it's due to multiple titles on a single disc sharing a set of tracks
• Almost Empty Tracks - A track with one frame, extract it and look at that frame and whatever it is is invisible. I'll also add to this a track that contains nothing but a single frame that shows the title of the disc, which lasts for only seconds in the beginning and yet somehow continues throughout all the titles in the disc.
• Lyrics Track - A track that exists solely to provide lyrics to certain songs within the movie... just in case we want to sing along.
• Forced Commentary Track - for some of those commentaries that are just edited together, or partially edited together, whenever the voice of someone who hasn't introduced themselves starts to be heard (a sound byte or something) it will point out who they are. Sometimes the first occurrence can be well into playback, after all the original commentators have verbally introduced themselves and talked for a while. They can also include the forced subtitles from the main track.
• Separate US English/British English Tracks - On casual observation they seem the same, even extracting them and looking at them you can miss the difference. The only clue is that the file sizes are different. Unless you're lucky the only sure fire way to tell them apart is to do a full OCR and do a byte/text comparison of the results. They can also each have their own "forced" tracks.
• Separate Normal and SDH Forced Tracks - ...
• Java Tracks - PGS = Presentation Graphics Stream, they're just pictures and they don't have to be pictures of text. For some reason MakeMKV includes all the Java track subtitles in the main title and as far as I'm aware they're always listed as "eng". Even extracting these things and looking at them doesn't explain what the hell they're supposed to be, Java titles can be a mixture of Picture on Picture, Audio over Audio, timed JPG/PNG overlays and PGS graphics tracks... looking at a single element in that mess tells you very little. The best thing to do with these is to simply remove them form the file, but if you must know what they are you'll have to find and watch the Java title from the actual Blu Ray.
• Leet Track - Just the mere existence of this proves the pointlessness of trying to classify subtitle tracks. It's a joke basically, it serves no actual purpose other than to be entertaining. Beware.

I'm sure I've come across more crap then this on discs, the authors aren't obligated to add anything in particular and can pretty much add whatever the hell they feel like. They don't care if they're a pain in the arse to sort through, you're not supposed to be ripping them in the first place.

If anyone wants to add anything I may have missed feel free, I wish someone had told me discs with separate US/British tracks was a possibility before I stumbled upon one.

[Woodstock]

... I wish someone had told me discs with separate US/British tracks was a possibility before I stumbled upon one.

Fortunately, I just had someone tell me.

Of course, I might not have noticed, because I find myself having to remember there is no U in "behavior", despite never living in a place that uses British spellings.

[ndjamena]

I'm having vague memories of other problems I've had to deal with in regards to subtitles.

There was one where a large section at the starts of two tracks were identical, but one had more frames then the other. There was nothing obvious about the text I could see to distinguish them so I had to keep writing numbers into DVDSubExtractor until I found the point of divergence. 100, 1800, 300, 1500 (or something a bit cleverer than that)... I found it eventually but I don't remember what the difference turned out to be or even what movie it was.

...And writing that made me forget what the other problem I was remembering was...

[Chetwood]

Ignoring the troll and whatever grudge is eating him...

Said the clown answering my post in the other thread. Clever way to ignore, genius.

[spl147]

All i do is play the movie from the disk, select each english sub track one by one, watch a few seconds if they are speaking english and subs appear, that one is not it, if they all appear, then load the disk in makemkv and select forced only, if there is one it will pull it out..... On another note, if when going through them one doesnt display when speaking english then thats ur forced track..... Works 100% for me.