Forced Subs on Blu-Ray seems a bit random?

[probedb]

I finally got round to starting to rip my collection and after figuring out what FOrced Subs was I started using that.

Some discs this has worked fine, i.e. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. However I ripped Kill Bill Vol 1 last night, selected only forced subs on both English tracks and I have no subtitles.

I know this disc has subtitles, do studios just randomly decide to use forced subs or a separate subitlte tracks for them?

Also is there anyway to just rip subtitles tracks so that if I discover there are no forced subs but are in a proper subtitle track I don't have to wait hours for the disc to rip again?

Many thanks

[Woodstock]

Subtitles are ... an interesting study in preferences at the studio level.

Dealing with subtitles on just about everything I rip, I find that the most often used method is two tracks for each language. One contains "everything", one contains only the so-called "forced" subtitles, for signs and non-dubbed language sections. And the order of the subtitle tracks can be either forced-first, or forced-second.

Occasionally, you will find titles (like Avatar) that have a subtitle track with everything, but some (the navi translations) are marked "forced".

And then there are the companies that only put one subtitle track in, all subtitles are in it, and no distinction is made between types. You either have them on all the time, or you have to guess at the meaning of signs and other writing.

And the player itself comes into the picture, in that some will ALWAYS play the FIRST subtitle track found, so you want to make sure that the correct one for your normal viewing situation is first.

The way I deal with it is to rip all tracks, and remove/re-order them after the fact. Since I run everything handbrake before it goes on the media server, I watch sections with VLC to get information on which subtitle tracks are which, then use that to create the batch jobs to do the conversion. If you don't want to go through the time of a recoding of the video, you can use tools like mkvmerge to re-order the tracks and strip out the unneeded ones.

[probedb]

Thanks for the reply. The joys of standards eh

So Kill Bill, the subtitles track turned out to be the 3rd one!

I guess it's a case of suck it and see.

[ThePharoah]

There is a spreadsheet maintained by someone at AVS Forum that tracks which movies have forced subs. It's not complete, but has many mainstream movies, and you can zero in on the part of the movie where the 1st forced sub should be: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... dit#gid=20

Cheers.

[probedb]

Excellent, thanks for this. I may start my ripping again and make a list of all the discs I have

I just wish it didn't take so long to rip them!

[Goozoo]

It depends on the media player that you are using also. If you have an Oppo for example, you will need to select the correct subtitle and it will display correctly while the movie is playing. I burn forced only and then pick whichever works with the movie.

[probedb]

It depends on the media player that you are using also. If you have an Oppo for example, you will need to select the correct subtitle and it will display correctly while the movie is playing. I burn forced only and then pick whichever works with the movie.

I use a Mede8er and you have to select them. I have no problem with this....it's the trying to figure out whether there should be subtitles in a film without watching it.

I think I'll stick to watching a film in my Oppo and then ripping it when I know what it should be