Woman in Gold no Forced subtitles

[zoxxo]

I'm trying to rip "Woman in Gold" with MakeMKV v1.9.7 x64-release and I'm having problems with subtitles. The forced subtitles will not show in the ripped file no matter what options I select when ripping the movie. I have selected all of the English subtitle options and I even tried selecting all of the available language options with no luck. I'm using the US release of the movie. Am I missing something? If you need more info, please don't hesitate to ask!

[Woodstock]

What are you gauging the presence/absence of "forced" subtitles by?

The most usual way subtitle tracks are arranged is two per language, one containing "everything", the other containing only those things NOT covered by the dub, such as signs and other languages than the dub. This second track is what most people refer to as "forced", but it is actually rare that the track have ANY subtitles FLAGGED as "forced".

When MakeMKV copies a track with the "forced only" option, it reads the track and copies ONLY those with the "forced" flag set.... If none have the flag set, nothing gets copied.... the whole track should be considered "forced.

[zoxxo]

I've been ripping for a while, and this is the first time that I can say that I've seen this problem. The best way that I can describe the problem is that if I pop the disk into a blu-ray player, I get subtitles when ever there is a foreign language spoken (i.e. french, german, etc.), but not when the default language (English in this case) is spoken. When I rip any movie, I always select all "English" regular and forced subtitles, and deselect all other languages.

With the "Woman in Gold," right in the first scene there are two people talking in German. Watching on disc, I get the subtitled conversation, but the ripped file does not have the subtitles.

Am I missing something, or is this disc an anomaly?

[Woodstock]

When you open the disk with MakeMKV, how many English subtitle tracks are shown, one or two? You can see this by expanding the information about the title by clicking on the little triangle next to it in the upper left panel after opening the disk. It will show you all the video, audio, subtitle, and "other" tracks within the title.

Is the original DVD or Bluray? And what are you using to play the MKV files?

[zoxxo]

There is one "main" English PGS track and then a "forced only" subtrack indented within it...

[Woodstock]

On most titles, you'll always see the "forced only" checkbox - it's an option to extract the TAGGED forced subtitles for the track in question, and make a separate track for them. It is useful for some players, but dependent upon there being tagged subtitles within the track. When you do the rip, the debug log will usually say, "Forced subtitle track X was empty, removing". If there ARE tagged subtitles, you end up with two tracks in the MKV file, and the smaller of them contains just the forced subtitles found in the original.

There isn't much more I can tell you about the situation without having the disk, but there might be some clues in a debug log of the rip.

[zoxxo]

OK, I don't know why, but last night I missed the fact that there are two sets subtitle/forced only pairs in the movie. However, I do remember ripping the title originally with both sets of subtitle pairs selected.

I enabled logging and the log file says that both forced only tracks were empty and so they were omitted from the rip. Which leaves me confused because when I play the disc, I do see the forced only subtitles. One thing that I failed to mention is that if I enable subtitles in the player, I can see the forced text, but I also see all of the other dialog text as well.

Not sure where to go from here. It's not a great loss if I can't rip the file, it's just one of those to have movies. I'm attaching the log file for your review.

[Woodstock]

OK, this movie seems to follow the normal scheme of putting the forced titles into their own track. When MakeMKV tries to copy the flagged-as-forced subtitles out on them to separate forced-only tracks (#5 and #7 in your log), there were none... so the FO tracks were removed.

What happens if you select the second track in your player?

The order that the two tracks are number affects which plays in most players. If the smaller track is first, you'll see only the "forced" subtitles. But a lot of publishers put the FULL track first, then set up the menu to make the player use the other track. You don't have menus in the MKV file, so the player just uses the first track found.

You can change the order of the subtitle tracks with other tools. I do it using handbrake (handbrake.fr), because I also compress the video.

[zoxxo]

OK, selecting the second track gives me just the forced titles. I also rerip with Handbrake, so I ripped one chapter with the second subtitle track and it played just fine.

Thanks for helping me figure this one out. I've been using MakeMKV for 1-2 years now, but I'm always learning something new about MakeMKV or Handbrake which makes the process easier and more interesting!

Thanks Woodstock!

[Woodstock]

No problem... Subtitles are a factor on 95% of what I rip, and so I have seen a lot of variations.

Because of this, I created a MakeMKV profile that selects everything, then I sort it out in the post-processing. Playing a few minutes of the file in VLC lets me see which variation of audio and subtitle tracks was used, and then I can use that information to tell handbrake to construct the "most compatible" file for my needs.

[zoxxo]

I grab all of the "English" audio tracks and subtitles when I rip from MakeMKV. For subtitles (when I'm in HandBrake) I just pull the forced subtitles. I have to admit that setting up audio with Handbrake still has me confused. I thought I was selecting the right audio tracks, but when I watched the movies on my xbox, I would get stuttering and lags in Plex. I finally just switched to the audio defaults options, Select English, and then tell it to pull all of the audio files that match English. I'm sure I could do better, but I'm still trying to find some good resources that will tell me how I maximize my audio and subtitle selections in the movie...

[Woodstock]

XBox has some funky requirements, but handbrake settings are best discussed where they support it, forums.handbrake.fr.

[zoxxo]

Cool! I'll give it a look--thanks!