Switch off Subtitles During Playback by Default

[olfab]

Dear all,

just upgraded from version 1.14.5 to version 1.14.7 on macos catalina. Then started to rip season 3 of The Expanse. As with season 1 and 2 German and English subtitles and forced subtitles were checked in the titles. When I checked the rips of season 3 by playing them back using vlc I noticed that subtitles are on by default, namely the English ones. They are off in season 1 and 2 which have been ripped with version 1.14.5.

Subtitles are supposed to be off by default.

The "Default selection rule" reads: "-sel:all,+sel:(favlang|nolang),-sel:mvcvideo,=100:all,-10:favlang"

What's wrong?

Thanks for your help and best regards,
Fabian

[Grauhaar]

Subtitles are supposed to be off by default.
The "Default selection rule" reads: "-sel:all,+sel:(favlang|nolang),-sel:mvcvideo,=100:all,-10:favlang"

Subtitles are not "On" or "Off". Subtitles can be ripped or not by selecting them, eigther manuell or by the above rule. Your rule selets "Favlang" (f.e Eng, set in MakeMKV) and "Nolang" audio and subtitle tracks.

In the VLC settings a default subtitle language can be speified. But VLC does not check the "Forced" track attribute flag in the MKV header. Anyway, MakeMKV does not set the "Forced" flag for a track in the MKV header. This can be done with the "MKVToolNIX" header editor.
So, if for VLC f.e. an "Eng" subtitle track exists, it is selected in any case, forced or not. Maybe the season 1+2 has "forced" subtitle tracks and the "forced" track is in the first position and VLC selects them, you see the "forced" track which caontains only some few subtitles. If Season 3 does not contaon a "forced" subtitle track and only the normal subtitle track, and the track is in the first position you see the normal subtitles. Yeah, it's complicated

You did not wrote if a Blu-ray or DVD is ripped. MakeMKV can only separate "Forced flagged" individual subtitles from the main subtitle stream into an extra subtitle stream. This is not implemeted for DVDs.

So it is important to know, what subtitle tracks are ripped with Season 1+2, which language they have and what is ripped with season 3. Best is to cerate a "Text" listung with MediaInfo and post it here to see what is inside the mkvs.

[olfab]

Good evening. Thanks for your help. Downloaded MediaInfo.

The movie "The Expanse S02 E01 - Safe" has been ripped with MakeMKV 1.14.4 and the playback is without subtitles by default.
The movie "theexpanse2_disc1" is the same as "The Expanse S02 E01 - Safe" but has been ripped with MakeMKV 1.14.7 and the playback is with subtitles by default.
In other words: I have ripped the same movie on the same disk once with MakeMKV 1.14.4 and once with MakeMKV 1.14.7.

The output of MediaInfo for "The Expanse S02 E01 - Safe" and "theexpanse2_disc1" are saved in the enclosed files with the corresponding names.

I assume the subtitles being displayed and not displayed is caused by the setting "Default" in the section "Text #1":
In "The Expanse S02 E01 - Safe" it is: "No"
In "theexpanse2_disc1" it is "Yes"

If my assumption is correct, how do I change this setting from "Yes" to "No" in MakeMKV?

Thanks and best regards,
Fabian

[jhaze84]

I had the same problem after upgrading to 1.14.6 (and subsequently 1.14.7). I discovered it is due to the default MakeMKV profile having a setFirstSubtitleTrackAsDefault settings which is set to true.

There is more information about profiles and settings here: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4385

You can change this setting by making your own profile that sets setFirstSubtitleTrackAsDefault to false. The steps to do this are (this is for Windows 10 installation, so paths will be different on MacOS):

1. Copy default.mmcp.xml from C:\Program Files (x86)\MakeMKV\appdata.tar\ (may need a program like 7-zip to open the tar archive) to the MakeMKV data directory, likely C:\Users\<user>\.MakeMKV

2. Rename the file to something unique like myprofile.mmcp.xml

3. Edit the file in Notepad and change the name on line 4 from ":5086" to something meaningful like "My Profile"

4. Change setFirstSubtitleTrackAsDefault on line 11 to "false".

5. Open MakeMKV, open Preferences, check the Expert Mode box. Go to the Advanced tab, and change the Default Profile to "My Profile" (or whatever you named it).

6. Rip the disc again, the resulting MKV will not have default subtitles, just like in the older version of the program.

[Chetwood]

In the VLC settings a default subtitle language can be speified. But VLC does not check the "Forced" track attribute flag in the MKV header. Anyway, MakeMKV does not set the "Forced" flag for a track in the MKV header.

VLC however DOES check for the default = yes flag in the header and will display a sub which is flagged as such despite the default language setting not being set. As jhaze84 mention, the profile comes with a

setFirstSubtitleTrackAsDefault="true"

but it also has

setFirstForcedSubtitleTrackAsDefault="true".

[olfab]

Thank for your help. It worked.

Since MakeMKV runs on macOS, the paths are a little different. Just in case someone else need to make this or another change on macOS, here is what is different with respect to windows:

The file default.mmcp.xmp is located in /Applications/MakeMKV.app/Contents/Resources/appdata.tar

The modified and renamed file is to be present in /Users/"username"/Library/MakeMKV

Thanks again an best regards,
Fabian

[Esch30]

The steps to do this are (this is for Windows 10 installation, so paths will be different on MacOS):

Thank you so much for posting this. I did a bit of searching after I ran into the same problem, assuming someone else would have also experienced this. I can confirm this worked like a charm.

[morbius]

And still no explanation of why the defaults have changed since 1.14.5? Clearly this has caused a number of users some inconvenience.