Reading subtitle file mks

[bizzaro]

A show (Death Note) I've been ripping keeps episodes with commentary as separate files. I've been using mkvmerge to take just the one audio track containing the commentary and adding it to the file with everything else. I've noticed though that the commentary files contain two english subtitle tracks, as well as two english audio tracks. From watching with vlc the subtitles don't appear to do anything, not even to translate foreign text. The audio tracks also appeared to be identical. When I exported the subtitle tracks alone they each came out to be 6kb each. Is there a way to read an mks file to make sure it's empty?

[Woodstock]

This is not universal... but...

A lot of Anime has multiple English tracks, and even multiple Japanese. The extra tracks are (usually) commentary.

On a series that was mastered with "one large play-all track" that contains all the episodes (even if MakeMKV finds the individual episodes), all the episodes will have these extra tracks, even if only one or two episodes include commentary.

On episodes with Japanese commentary, you will find additional subtitle tracks for those audio tracks. Again, they could be present across several episodes, even if the commentary isn't there.

What is really fun is when you find shows that were mastered with 2.0 stereo audio, but have commentary tracks in 5.1; MakeMKV will default to taking the 5.1 commentary track, and ignoring the 2.0 show audio, so you have to manually select the correct audio tracks.

[Chetwood]

You can extract the PGS files with MKVCleaver or MKVextractGUI and check them in BDSUP2SUB.

[bizzaro]

This is not universal... but...

A lot of Anime has multiple English tracks, and even multiple Japanese. The extra tracks are (usually) commentary.

On a series that was mastered with "one large play-all track" that contains all the episodes (even if MakeMKV finds the individual episodes), all the episodes will have these extra tracks, even if only one or two episodes include commentary.

On episodes with Japanese commentary, you will find additional subtitle tracks for those audio tracks. Again, they could be present across several episodes, even if the commentary isn't there.

What is really fun is when you find shows that were mastered with 2.0 stereo audio, but have commentary tracks in 5.1; MakeMKV will default to taking the 5.1 commentary track, and ignoring the 2.0 show audio, so you have to manually select the correct audio tracks.

The Death Note DVDs each contain one large file with all the episodes, as well as an individual file containing the commentary episode. How they handled the audio and subtitle tracks wasn't very consistent though. On the first few DVDs there would be only one subtitle track for both the spoken and written words. Then later they starting making them separate. Then for some reason the commentary files have two 2.0 audio tracks that are identical (both commentary) as well as two subtitle tracks that are empty.

I think everything is good now. I split up each big file into individual episodes, then I added the commentary audio to the appropriate episodes, making sure the normal english audio are the default tracks.

You can extract the PGS files with MKVCleaver or MKVextractGUI and check them in BDSUP2SUB.

Thanks, that helped a lot.