Subtitle process (MakeMKV and Handbrake for Blu-ray)

[terryeaves]

OSX 10.11.6
MakeMKV 1.10.8
HB 1.0.7
Been ripping my blu-rays and not sure about the best process for subtitles. I don't really have have foreign language films so I need subtitles for when someone speaks other than english, sign language, aliens...
1) Will selecting forced subtitles in MKV take care of this?
2) Do you still need to select something under subtitles in HB if #1 above is correct?
3) If #1 is the answer is it ok to just add forced to every rip just in case.

I have seen in some other posts that folks say select all audio tracks for your language (I do this today) and for subtitles and then sort it out in HB.
Not real sure on how to sort it out in HB.

Any guidance is greatly appreciated.

[Woodstock]

Asking MakeMKV to find "forced" subtitles is something I do for every rip.

So far, I have only found one disk that has "flagged as forced" subtitles on it, Avatar. Everything else has had the forced subtitles in their own track, and the only reliable way to find that out is to rip everything, then watch it with something like VLC to identify the proper tracks, then make sure the "forced" track is the FIRST track listed when compressing with handbrake.

Sometimes, there isn't a track that only has foreign audio and signs...

[terryeaves]

Thanks Woodstock.

So, rip with MakeMKV and select all subtitles (English) and then watch with VLC. Then there is some way within VLC to try the various subtitle streams to ID the one I want HB to use.
Think I will need to bone up on VLC.

[Woodstock]

VLC's Subtitle menu allows you to select, by number, the subtitle to display. I usually check the title sequence (should be subtitles) and dialog a few minutes after (shouldn't be subtitles).

On anime, that usually covers finding the "forced" track, and that's the one I tell handbrake to include first, followed by whichever track is the "full" track. Lately, Funimation has put track 2 as "forced only" and track 1 as "full", although they sometimes reverse that.

For The Martian, the "forced" track was track #9... I had to re-encode The Martian a couple of times.

[keber007]

I have been using this online database as a reference for movies that have forced subtitles, and has been EXTREMELY useful for me... granted I watch the physical disc copy before I rip it anyway to confirm if there are any additional subs that aren't listed, but that's my OCD for ya! lol

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 2134580265

[morbius]

Likewise I tend to pop a disc that might have forced subs into a an actual player first as this can give some clues.

As mentioned, most titles handle this via a dedicated track. Game of Thrones uses forced subs on many episodes, embedded in the main track, as per Avatar.

[xr200]

I use Don Melton's scripts available here:

https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

as a front end to running HandBrakeCLI.

video_transcoding has an option

--burn-subtitle scan
`scan` to find forced track in main audio language

I've found it to be extremely reliable watching English language movies and I want to see the subtitles when
someone speaks some other language (and not see the subtitles when English is spoken).

Unrelated to subtitles, I've also found video_transcoding provides better picture quality
than I can get by manually selecting options in HandBrake on my own.

Here's a website that provides a lot more details:

https://robservatory.com/a-deep-dive-in ... anscoding/

[mattyj2001]

I've also found that Handbrake's auto/scan feature is quite reliable. You'll want to start by including all subtitle tracks in the language you speak, then in the GUI set the first/only track to Foreign Audio Search or whatever it is. I don't actually use Handbrake anymore since I'm anti-compression now.

I've also found that MakeMKV is good at picking out the needed subtitles when people speak a different language. My current process is to select _just_ the 'forced only' track and not the parent of the language you speak. If you're lucky, your rip will consist of exactly one subtitle. Then you can just include that directly in your Handbrake conversion.

If you end up with multiple forced subtitles, you can extract them with something like MKVTools then load them into BDSup2sub to find out what's in them and directly include the right one. Or don't re-process the MKV and play it with something like VLC, Infuse or Kodi and it'll show the subtitle automatically without re-encoding it into the video.

[Chetwood]

I've also found that MakeMKV is good at picking out the needed subtitles when people speak a different language.

Which is the opposite of pretty much everyone else's experience here. Since almost none of the subs are actually flagged as forced, MakeMKV can not recognize them automatically (unless Mike has changed something in the last versions where he checks for size/number of items).

[mattyj2001]

I've also found that MakeMKV is good at picking out the needed subtitles when people speak a different language.

Which is the opposite of pretty much everyone else's experience here. Since almost none of the subs are actually flagged as forced, MakeMKV can not recognize them automatically (unless Mike has changed something in the last versions where he checks for size/number of items).

I have around 150 Blu-ray rips, all done within the last year, so I've been using a contemporary version of MakeMKV on the Mac.

My process is to only select the forced subtitles for the language I want to see on screen (English), like this:

Screen Shot 2019-05-17 at 12.47.56 AM.png (77.21 KiB) Viewed 37967 times

I have my default selection rule set as "-sel:all,+sel:(favlang|nolang),-sel:mvcvideo,=100:all,-10:favlang,-sel:subtitle,+sel:(forced&(eng))"

I'm only interested in the forced English subtitles, not the full subtitles. I don't mix and match. This has resulted in perhaps a 90%+ success rate. The only disks I can think of that didn't work right were the first Bourne movie and any Star Wars disks that have subtitles in them.

Most of the time I end up with zero subtitle tracks, but looking at my list right now I have about 15 films with forced subtitles that I remember off the top of my head and MakeMKV found them all, with the above-mentioned exceptions.

I don't re-process my rips after MakeMKV is done with them, I use them as-is. Players like Kodi, Infuse and VLC correctly show the subtitles.

[Chetwood]

Would be interesting to know which BDs you had success with so people can verify. Maybe discs for different regions are in fact authored differently.

[mattyj2001]

Would be interesting to know which BDs you had success with so people can verify. Maybe discs for different regions are in fact authored differently.

The Bourne Ultimatum (UK release, but not Bourne Identity. It had the subs burned into the video directly.) The rest are US releases.
Looper
Ronin
Spy
The Deer Hunter
All three Godfathers
The Gand Budapest Hotel
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 1 and 2 (don't judge)

[Chetwood]

Dang, I got none of these BDs. What you could do is demux one or two of the sub tracks with TSMuxer and upload them so people can check it with BDSUP2SUB.

[wtaylorbasil]

I ripped "Once upon a time in Mexico" to MKV with all the subtitles included. There was no option to "Force" copy any of the other languages. I listen in English. How can I get the other language to show up when it is there, The DVD when played directly on Panasonic DMP110, the Mexican language comes up.

[philb1701]

I usually don't have an issue with HandBrake doing the transcoding of my mkv files from standard DVD or blu-rays. In those rare instances where I've discovered a foreign language is being used after the conversion, I reburn the mkv and then turn off those languages I don't want, leaving only English. I can only recall one instance of this and that was for a particular set of episodes of "The Big Bang Theory" where Portuguese was the default language. After deselecting all the languages I didn't want in makemkv before reburning it, the problem went away. It was funny as hell to watch Leonard and Sheldon playing "Physics Fiesta", which was supposed to be in remedial Spanish but actually overdubbed into Portuguese, but I digress.