Understanding Subtitles--Please Explain!

[swampdaddy]

Massive Subtitle confusion here. I typically select all English options and a few (if not all) foreign language options. Recently I've noticed when selecting all, I ended up with more than one Spanish and French... Today, I see that I three versions of English subtitles. Can you help me make sense of this?

Here is a screen shot from a recent RIP.

Screenshot 2019-06-20 14.04.38.png (335.2 KiB) Viewed 6962 times

Why might there be more than one for a given language?

When I select a subtitle language (the parent) there is always a "Forced" option as a sub record.... is this Forced option a second track?

Assuming that these different Subtitle tracks have a purpose is there a way to name these? It's not very useful to have 2-3 things named the same.

Which subtitles do I want? I'd like the default to be English and have the ability to select others.

Thanks,

Rob

[swampdaddy]

I was just analyzing my Subtitle tracks (for Hysteria, the other movie was Happy Death Day) and I noticed the following observations about the Subtitles:

One, Subtitles only (without descriptive text and without black background)
Two, Subtitles with Descriptive text and using a black background...
Three, appears to be the same as One above.
Four, appears to be the same as Two above.
Five, Subtitle for the Commentary track.
Six, appears to be the same as Five above.

Here is the screen shot from MakeMKV:

Screenshot 2019-06-20 15.30.30.png (366.8 KiB) Viewed 6956 times

Why are there seemingly duplicate ST tracks?

How do you handle this? Do you tend to copy all ST tracks to the MKV or something else?

Thanks,

Rob

[Grauhaar]

Rip all subtitle tracks for your language(s), figure it out with f.e. VLC, and use "MKVTollNIX GUI" to remove unwanted and reorder it and set flags (Default / Forced) and Name it (if wanted) and remux the mkv file. There is no other way.

[swampdaddy]

Okay, it's hard to understand what I want when there can be up to 4 versions per language that all appear the same. However with the MediaInfo.app on Mac I can see that the counts and other metadata for a given Subtitle track is different but when I play a scene I cannot decree a difference, For example, here are a few screenshots from Pet Sematary (2019) which contains 21 subtitle tracks where some languages, say Spanish appear 4 times. Now I don't think these are duplicates so I'd like to understand what these are.

Here are the VLC ST menu items...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1hrlymnwkb5wr ... 2.png?dl=0

Screenshot 2019-07-13 17.10.22.png (440.67 KiB) Viewed 6680 times

Here is the MediaInfo data that shows that they are different in some way...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jveu1u7nll6ze ... 7.png?dl=0

Screenshot 2019-07-13 17.19.17.png (330.55 KiB) Viewed 6680 times

So, can you help me make sense of this? I really would like to understand how having 4 separate ST tracks for each language is offering something unique to each track. Perhaps they just need to be renamed.

Thanks,

Robert