Forced subtitles from DVD

[matrg]

Hi, first of all great program which I've had perfect results with for full English DVDs (I'm not using Blu-ray at present due to limitations in my home network).

However, when I try to create MKVs from DVDs such as District 9, where there is a lot of 'foreign' dialogue, I cannot get a situation where only the 'forced' subtitles are displayed when playing back the MKV in 7MC (or VLC) i.e. I either have to have subtitles completely on or completely off. Playing the DVD, even with subtitles off, it clearly has a flag to show text when the aliens are talking. This flag is not being preserved into the MKV as even when I set DirectVobSub to 'Forced only' it shows all the subtitles.

I note that when I did load up a ripped blu-ray into makeMKV it seemed to have an option to select only forced subtitles. Is this option available for DVD? If not is there an easy workaround?

Would greatly appreciate your advice on this as it is the only stalling point from converting everything to MKV!

Cheers

[mike admin]

DVDs have a separate track with forced subtitles, you should see several subtitle tracks for a single language. One of them should be track with only forced subtitles, alien talk in case of district9.

[Squeeky]

Hi,

In my own testing with DVDs, there are some discs that don't have forced subs as a separate track. For region two, both District 9 and the LOTR Extended Edition discs have a forced flag set on INDIVIDUAL sentences within a subtitle stream. DVD players just show these by default. If you want to see subtitles for ALL speech, then every subtitle is displayed from that same stream, rather than just the forced ones.

I don't know how common these types of disc are (I think they are more common in region 1) but for the most part DVDs in region 2 seem to do what mike admin suggests.

It would be great if makemkv could pick up these rarer discs such as District 9 too, but this is the only slight issue with an otherwise superb program (thanks!).

I have found a work around which I use though:
1. Extract desired video and audio to mkv with Makemkv.
2. Encode video and subtitles with Handbrake. (I discard this video, but you can't tell Handbrake not to encode video.) When doing the subtitles, select what is usually (with forced subtitle discs) the only subtitles stream and add it. Then select the same subtitle stream again and tick the "Forced only" and "Default" boxes. This gives you a forced subtitle stream and full subtitle stream. Add these in whichever order you like, but I usually prefer all full subtitle streams to be stream 1, and any forced subs to be in a stream 2 if they exist. Any other settings are irrelevant, we just want to use handbrake for extracting these forced subs, which it does well.
3. Mux the video and audio from step 1, and the subtitles from step 2 using mkvmerge.

Hope that helps, happy encoding.

S.

[matrg]

Thanks for both replies

My experience is as Squeeky describes, at least for District 9 - there is no purely 'forced sub' track.

It sounds as though this is very much the exception that proves the rule, which I'm glad to hear. I'll give the workaround a go.

Cheers

[mike admin]

Guys, you're right after all - DVDs do have forced flag on subtitles and MakeMKV ignores it. It'll be corrected likely in a next version.

[Squeeky]

That's great news mike, it will cut down the workflow complexity which always helps

Incidentally, I meant to mention earlier that DVDSubEdit is great to use on the vobs in VIDEO_TS folders to look at the subtitle streams. In the top right of the GUI there is a tickbox to only show forced subs in a particular stream - very handy for identifying the small number of discs that flag individual subtitles as forced.

One very unusual disc I've found is Airplane (R2) which has both types of subtitles we've been discussing - individual forced subs in the main english track, AND a separate track with only those same forced subs in.

S.

[crowfax]

Guys, you're right after all - DVDs do have forced flag on subtitles and MakeMKV ignores it. It'll be corrected likely in a next version.

This is awesome news.

[matrg]

Guys, you're right after all - DVDs do have forced flag on subtitles and MakeMKV ignores it. It'll be corrected likely in a next version.

This is great news.

After trying a few films there is actually a substantial minority with forced subs, even if it's only usually a couple of lines here and there.

As far as I can see there is no software available that will repack DVD into mkv without transcoding and keep forced subs on - MakeMKV is by far the closest to getting it right!

Mike, any chance of a rough schedule to the next version? - only so that I know whether it's worth spending any more time using the workaround described above or just wait for the update.

Cheers

[nick1977]

New to the forum, but just wanted to say the forced subtitle problem is something I would really like an answer to too.
I recently bought a sumvision cyclone media player, and makeMKV is (almost) the perfect tool for creating MKVs from my DVD collection. However, to make it 100% perfect, it would be useful if it checked the subtitle tracks for forced subtitles, and then created a separate (additional) subtitle track if necessary, that was set to forced.
Is there any chance of this happening, and if so what sort of timescale are we looking at for the next release? If it's a few weeks or so I'll wait, but if we're talking months I may have to hunt around for an alternative solution

Nick

[bm29759]

Not fixed in v1.6

Been trying to capture the English subtitles from the Region 1 DVDs "Da Vinci Code" and "Angels & Demons" when they are speaking French.

[chapindad]

Wow. This is a little disappointing. I have found I have more movies than I thought with forced subtitles and now I have to find something to rip them with for Plex.

[Rainforest1155]

Guys, you're right after all - DVDs do have forced flag on subtitles and MakeMKV ignores it. It'll be corrected likely in a next version.

Any news on this? I'd like to start ripping my DVD collection but don't want to run into any subtitle troubles afterwards. I have many DVDs including LOTR and District 9. I'm sure there are more in my collection that have foreign language parts.

I really like makemkv and hope the forced subtitle issue will be resolved finally.

Thx!

[Neil__C]

+1

I'm also waiting to do the big conversion job. A bit of testing on my (1500!) DVD titles suggests that most either won't need subtitles or have the forced subtitles as a separate sub track. The real problem is with movies such as District 9. These have parts of an english subtitle track flagged as forced.

What I need is some software, preferably makemkv, that can reliably identify these forced subtitles and accomodate them in its output. Handbrake does this perfectly but I really don't want to convert DVDs to h264, I want the original mpeg2 untouched.

Any ideas if or when this facility wqill be abailable in makemkv?

Thanks in anticipation.

[Insomnic]

Each release I keep hoping that the "will be available in next version" statement will be true. I'm really looking forward to using and recommending this software for converting DVD collections but I can't until that option is available. I'm looking forward to it though and once it's available I'd be willing to pay for the software since in all other aspects this software is almost a perfect conversion tool.

[Farkle]

Guys, you're right after all - DVDs do have forced flag on subtitles and MakeMKV ignores it. It'll be corrected likely in a next version.

Hate to bring up such an old thread, but I see that in the latest version this still isn't working. Will this be fixed in a near future version? I've seen the work around but just seems like a lot of work for a few minutes of forced subtitles. If this has been fixed, please let me know what I might be doing wrong. Thanks.