Forced Subtitles and 4K Ripping. GOT

[caleyd]

Does MakeMKV natively mux forced subtitles when checked or is that meaningless?
I can't remember ever having it work on any of my 300 plus 4K's.
I'm doing GOT right now and the Dothraki subtitles do not appear. The log shows as nothing there.

Thanks for any help!

[dcoke22]

It is often the case that what we think of as forced subtitles aren't in a forced subtitle track. They are often in one of the regular subtitle tracks. Once you figure out which track that is, you can label them as such and either burn them in while transcoding or setup your player to use that track during playback.

[Chetwood]

As recently discussed in the thread 'Botched subtitles when ripping Avatar' it's usually the other way round: the forced subtiles are stored in their own track where they're not flagged as forced and as such are not recognized by MakeMKV since it apparently only checks for this flag and not for size or menu commands. As Woodstock writes, this is case on most US BDs. German BDs - including GoT - have forced items flagged as such as part of the full track and should be recognized by MakeMKV.

If you demux the PGS sub with TsMuxer you can check the number of forced items in the sub with BDSup2sub.

[dcoke22]

I think we are in agreement here.

Personally, I usually make a backup of the disc, then load the backup into MakeMKV. I make a .mkv of the movie or TV episodes then I check them in MPV (or whatever your favorite player is). From this I can usually quickly figure out what subtitle tracks are which as well as which audio tracks are commentaries or descriptive audio tracks. I then title them in MakeMKV and make a 'final' .mkv. In my experience, making mkv files from a backup on a hard drive to another hard drive is quite fast.

[TheCrazyCanuck]

GoT in season 1 on 1080p bluray was missing a lot of Dothraki subs, the 4k set has more but I did find the scene where Drogo and Daenerys meet was missing subs so I think I found them online somewhere and just adjusted the timing a little in subtitle edit. Subtitle edit for whatever reason didn't handle the forced subs very well on this 4k GoT set but it's nothing an hour of proofreading couldn't fix

Typically when I rip using makemkv I just rip all the subtitle tracks since I'm too lazy to disable most of them. Then when I feed the resulting mkv file into subtitle edit it does a good job (finally) identifying the forced subtitles so that I can create a .srt file from them.