Can somebody explain why titles are mastered separately for Japanese?

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rogodeter
Posts: 25
Joined: Wed Jan 28, 2015 10:02 pm

Can somebody explain why titles are mastered separately for Japanese?

Post by rogodeter » Thu Dec 27, 2018 5:45 pm

Many discs will present me (in MakeMKV) with two main titles, one with English (and other latin languages like French, Italian, Spanish, etc., and then another title with Japanese and others). This is consistent enough that I know it's by design. Does it have to do with the way subtitles are rendered? Or is there some other reason the publishers create two titles in order to offer Japanese and other languages (Japanese seems to be the factor that consistently causes a separate title)

Up until this point, I've just been selecting the title that does NOT have Japanese (and has English) and it has been working.

This is just out of curiosity for me.

Thanks

Woodstock
Posts: 10327
Joined: Sun Jul 24, 2011 11:21 pm

Re: Can somebody explain why titles are mastered separately for Japanese?

Post by Woodstock » Thu Dec 27, 2018 5:55 pm

Studio preferences. I don't see this often, because I'm not buying Disney/Ghibli titles that often (have "all" of them, so...). "Everything else" has been authored with one title with all languages. I think the first time I saw it was with When Marnie Was Here.

The "fix" is to rip both, then merge the audio track from one into the "main" with mkvmerge from mkvtoolnix to make a "proper" file. I remember having an issue with one title where the two Japanese titles had different lengths than the English title; don't remember how I worked around that.

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