Night At The Museum Closed Captions Issue

[keber007]

I have seen several posts about Night at the Museum 3 issues, but none related to the problem I am having. For some reason, when I rip Night at the Museum BD with NO subtitles selected I end up with 2 Closed Captions tracks in VLC. I confirmed these do in deed exist, and are a huge pain! I only rip with forced subtitles, and remove ALL others, so i can have them enabled by default in Plex. This is causing a big headache for me, and have not been able to find a way to remove these sub tracks... I have MKVToolNix and am not able to see any sub tracks in that software. I have tried this on both my blu ray drives (ASUS BW-16D1HT Firmware 3.10 patched & Pioneer BD-RW BRD-211M Firmware 1.02) with the same resulting CC subtitle files. I do NOT want to run this through handbrake unless there is a way to keep the original quality of the video and not have a 2x larger file size (I've tried just passthrough, and this has resulted in a massively large .mkv file in the past). Any help removing these WITHOUT degrading the original quality of the video file would be most appreciated!

CC0.JPG (88.61 KiB) Viewed 15236 times

CC1.JPG (54.62 KiB) Viewed 15236 times

CC2.JPG (52.35 KiB) Viewed 15236 times

[Woodstock]

Closed Captions are part of the video stream, not a separate track. MakeMKV now makes it possible to copy CC out of the video stream into a subtitle stream, but they're still present in the video stream.

If you use handbrake to transcode the file for better compression, the CC text will be removed from the video.

[keber007]

Woodstock,

Thanks for that info, is there a way to remove those cc tracks from the mkv without running through handbrake? This is the only movie this has happened to me with, other movies do not have these tracks poping up and I want to remove them without compressing the video file. I have a massive amount of storage space, and prefer the original best video quality i can get, even if it takes up more space...

Thanks!

[keber007]

On a somewhat related topic, is it possible to "burn" a subtitle track into the video stream without compressing the video stream? Is handbrake capable of this, or is there another software package that can do it (MKVToolNix maybe)? I would appreciate any help on this also, as I am very hesitant to re-encode anything I have at the risk of losing video quality...

Thanks!!

[Woodstock]

The answer to both questions is really "no", but there may be methods I'm not aware of for "remove the CC track".

If you're going to burn a subtitle track in, the video has to be extracted, the subtitle information overlaid on it, then it needs to be saved again, and if you don't compress it, it's going to be huge.

"Massive storage space" can disappear rather quickly... I filled up a 24TB array in just a couple of years, and I'm 40% full on the 70TB array that replaced it, AFTER everything was run through handbrake and compressed. Anime compresses very well (average 90%), but 700+ series still takes up space.

[Grauhaar]

is it possible to "burn" a subtitle track into the video stream without compressing the video stream?

"Burn-in" means, the video must be decoded, the subtitle is put (overlayed) into the videobuffer, and the video is re-encoded.

Compressing means always re-encoding with losing some information (see below).

as I am very hesitant to re-encode anything I have at the risk of losing video quality...

The re-encoding is not bad. It depends on the level of "compression". I reduce the blu-ray streams to approx. 5GB per hour, this saves 50-70% of space with very very limited quality impact. I use VidCoder (uses the Handbarke core) with an Constant Quality Level of 17-19 to reduce the size. Maybe for some streams with an additional de-noising (with the NL-Means option).

[keber007]

Grauhaar,

Thanks for your reply... In an ideal world I would like to keep the original file quality and file size. I have plenty of storage space, so this is not an issue for me, i value the quality over the quantity of my movie collection. I have recently been made aware that Plex MUST transcode every video stream that has subtitles (which is taxing on the server & causes buffering issues when there are more than one stream being played, etc). In order for me to "direct play" these files without transcoding, I would need to embed (burn) the subtitles into the video stream. I want to be able to effectively "leave the video alone" and just "copy" it, and "paste" onto it the subs. Keep in mind I am ONLY doing this for movies with forced subs for foreign language scenes, so there should be minimal effort required to do this, I just don't know what software package to use, or if one even exists... :/ I know this has run off topic from my original post, but it is somewhat related.

Thanks guys for any help you can provide!!

[Grauhaar]

Keep in mind I am ONLY doing this for movies with forced subs for foreign language scenes, so there should be minimal effort required to do this, I just don't know what software package to use, or if one even exists...

I'm a little bit confused. There is no tool and no way available to do this without "transcoding" (same as re-encoding) or re-encoding to "burn-in" subtitles. You can use VidCoder or Handbreak for it, use the right profile settungs and a Quality Level of 17-19.

In an ideal world I would like to keep the original file quality and file size

Understood, but pleace note, Blu-ray data holds a lot of "Hot Air". The compression is done to produce big file sizes in a way that after some video delta frames a complete picture is used as a new basis. The re-encoding with other encoders uses much more delta frames before a new complete picture is used. Best is to perform some checks by yourself to see the difference (or not) after re-encoding with good qualitly levels.

[keber007]

I'm a little bit confused. There is no tool and no way available to do this without "transcoding" (same as re-encoding) or re-encoding to "burn-in" subtitles.

So, in Adobe photoshop, i can place another image (or text) on top of the image in a new "layer", without touching the original image at all or reducing the quality. The 2 are completely independent (much like a video track and a subtitle track), but still related. I can then perform an operation that is VERY FAST and SIMPLE to "flatten" the layers into one layer. This still does not alter the pixels of the photo, other than where the additional layer data has been written on top of it. I want to be able to do that to my movies. Basically take each frame of the video file where there needs to be a subtitle, overlay the text for x number of frames, and "flatten" the image back without changing the rest of the picture. It seems like such a simple operation, now I also realize that fundamentally video and pictures are handled much differently, but video is created from a very large number of pictures, so they aren't really so different... I can't believe that there is no software out there capable of doing this simple of an operation... 1-find first subtitle time start & end, 2-find corresponding frames, 3-"flatten" subtitles onto frame, leaving the rest of the picture alone, 4-find next subtitle & repeat. Maybe that is a feature in an adobe product that has a $5,000 price tag, but if it can do the operation in like 3-5 min per movie without losing quality, I'd be up for that! lol

You can use VidCoder or Handbreak for it, use the right profile settungs and a Quality Level of 17-19.

I am familiar with the concepts transcoding/re-encoding (i think some people use the term "muxing") to all convey the same process... Basically the data is compressed (even in the blu ray mkv file, this is still compressed from what the theaters play, and even more so than totally uncompressed 4k movies). I was surprised to find out that truely uncompressed 4K films take up anywhere from 500-750GB/HOUR up to over 1TB/HOUR of footage! So even the versions that I have now are pretty compressed at ove 10x smaller, and I'm ok with that being that is what is on the media, i'd rather not drop any additional data if i dont have to. Back on topic, I ran a few tests with handbrake, and I am:

1-Not happy with the quality of the result... I used 20 & 18 with the speed setting on medium or slow for both and I can visibly see a difference watching both versions (original and compressed) side by side on my 2x 28" Samsung 4K displays, so I would DEFINITELY see a difference on my 65" 4K TV...

2-I tried running with a number of "0", with the setting on medium, and this still looked worse than the original, and the resulting file was over 118GB from an original of 25GB file. I also tried using the "Placebo" speed, and Handbrake said it would take 8 days to finish... now mind u i Have a 6 core CPU w/hyperthreading, so that's just ridiculous...

3-Was also not happy with the times, each one of those was tested on the most recent mission impossible fallout movie, which does have some forced subs, and each encode took anywhere from 1.5 - 9hrs depending on the speed i selected. WAY TOO LONG for my movie collection of over 600 films!

Understood, but pleace note, Blu-ray data holds a lot of "Hot Air".

I'm OK with the "hot air" lol, I just want to be able to direct play my movies with the forced subs that apparently Blu Ray players can handle just fine!

[Grauhaar]

I just want to be able to direct play my movies with the forced subs that apparently Blu Ray players can handle just fine!

Blu-ray player passes an "Video Signal" via HDMI to the TV. This means, decode the video stream and put them in the output buffer and overlay it with the subtitle and send it out. But passing a stream from an server to an client cannot use this way. The server can only "add" the subtitle content to the existing video stream by re-encoding and send the new stream to the client.
You can use an "Hardware Media Player" which can read the mkv file direct from the server. This soulution acts like an Blu-ray player.

[Grauhaar]

I am familiar with the concepts transcoding/re-encoding (i think some people use the term "muxing") to all convey the same process...

Re-encoding has NOTHING to do with muxing. Muxing means, that different stream files (video, audio(s), subtitle(s)) are packaged together without modification into a sngle file.