Repeated audio/subtitle tracks

[Sidrack]

Can someone explain why this happen?

Since this thread is about LOST, I would like to add that season 3:

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Lost-The- ... 67/#Review

Has also Dolby Digital 2.0.

In fact there are 3 tracks:

English: LPCM 5.1 (48kHz, 16-bit) - listed by your review
English: Dolby Digital 5.1 - listed by your review
English: Dolby Digital 2.0 - not listed

And a strange thing is that episodes without audio commentary have a second English DD 2.0 track, but it might be a repeated track since there's nothing specifically different and it's not listed anywhere.



There's also a second english subtitle, so it must be a repeated track. Sometimes we see "repeated tracks" in Blu-ray extra features as well. Let's say the main movie has two distinct english tracks, and french/german/portuguese. Then we see:

2 english/french/german/PT tracks for all extra features. But after analysing, we only listen to 1 english audio track in each extra feature. This is redundant information that is repeated (the repeated track is either empty or they are all reading a single one), maybe for some software/hardware reason.

And no, this is not a MakeMKV specific bug, since I saw that repeated track using Total Media Theatre from Arcsoft. MakeMKV is not repeating any track, the disc is telling MakeMKV they are there... but they are not. Strange, isn't it?

[Smithcraft]

Depends on how the disc was mastered.

If there is a 'Play All' feature then I have sometimes found that while only certain episodes have commentary(DD 2.0) all the episodes from the disc will have an empty DD 2.0 track. Other times, only episodes with commentary will have the track.

SC

[Sidrack]

I guess this is the case where we see the MakeMKV warning: "track turned out to be empty and was removed". Why we have empty tracks in some discs I don't really know.

[Sidrack]

If I were to guess, I would say that without the empty tracks information, the player would have problem with the other contents of the disc?

Like I explained before, let's say the main feature has:

English Audio track
French Audio track
German Audio track
English subtitles
French subtitles

All these tracks are available and they exist.

However, if we start reading other episodes (besides that one with 5 tracks), let's say the 2nd episode has only:

English Audio track
French Audio track (not available)
German Audio track
English subtitles
French subtitles

And the extra features have:

English Audio track
French Audio track (not available)
German Audio track (not available)
English subtitles
French subtitles (not available)

MakeMKV would still list they are all available for all secondary contents.

It seems the information from the main feature (or the content with the highest number of tracks) is spread into others. After analysing we see these are empty tracks, but this is somehow annoying because it tricks us everytime.

I remember seeing title(s) that are even wasting Blu-ray disk space with those "empty tracks". Maybe they are not empty, but really repeated. I think "Rush Hour" (1998) might be a good example. Unselecting the additional tracks from extra features (they are all english) will (I need to check/confirm this again) return a smaller filesize.

[Chetwood]

I am also wondering why so we have empty tracks.

Apparently the routines are not perfect (yet). I had checked the forced stream checkbox on The Crow - City of Angels and ended up with a regular stream and the forced stream derived from it that had 18 or so items. Curiously enough neither had any items that were flagged as forced (as I verified with BDSUP2SUB).