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Hello,

I'm in the process of ripping some Blu-rays and I'm having problems with multiple subtitle tracks in XBMC. The show I'm ripping has some non-English dialog in forced subtitles and I also want full English subtitles available. I ripped the main audio and video into an .MKV with H.264 video and DTS audio and I've ripped the subtitles into two sets of .IDX/.SUB files (one for forced subtitles, one for full subtitles). To make it easier to tell the two subtitles tracks apart, I've tagged the forced subtitles as Mongolian when I was converting them with BDSup2Sub. My files look like this currently:

Show Name S01E02.English.idx
Show Name S01E02.English.sub
Show Name S01E02.Forced.idx
Show Name S01E02.Forced.sub
Show Name S01E02.mkv
Show Name S01E02.nfo
Show Name S01E02.tbn

When I open the .MKV on my desktop, VobSub lets me pick between the English and "Mongolian" subtitles and I see the expected subtitle track. However, when I play the video in XBMC and I try to turn on subtitles, I see "Unknown(Invalid) [Unknown]" in the subtitle toast and no subtitles show during playback. However, if I delete either .IDX/.SUB, I can select the remaining subtitle track just fine in XBMC. Is there some way I can get XBMC to allow me to cycle between both subtitle tracks? Is there a better way for me to accomplish my goal of having the option of forced subtitles or full subtitles in my Blu-ray rips?

Thank you,
SideVariable
Hello,

The way you described it makes it seem like there is a bug since the Subtitle page on the XBMC wiki says you can use whatever language names you want as long as you follow the format. That would have to be confirmed by someone more knowledgeable than me, of course. It is odd that VobSub only lets you choose between English and "Mongolian" though because shouldn't there be another option like English Forced or simply Forced? idx/sub files can have multiple languages in them, so the English and Mongolian may only be in one of those. Maybe there is a problem with the other idx/sub file rather than this being a bug.

Anyhow, if it does end up being a bug, a couple workarounds that I can think of off the top of my head are:

1) Use SubtitleCreator (http://www.videohelp.com/tools/SubtitleCreator) to combine the multiple idx and sub files into one idx/sub file. You'd still get all the choices, but there would only be one idx/sub combo.

2) Use a tool to combine the subtitles into the MKV file (and possibly convert the format of the subtitles). You'd have to do some searching around to figure out how to do this, but it would also work.

Good luck!
Hi Robotic,

Thanks for the response and the suggested workarounds. I don't think either idx/sub is bad or malformed because XBMC can read either one just fine if I temporarily delete the other one. I suspect I am either missing some small thing in the naming of the multiple subtitle files or XBMC has a bug around that (I should mention that I'm running 11.0 "Eden"). As for you suggested workarounds:

1. I couldn't figure out how to get SubtitleCreator to merge idx/sub files, but I did find VobsubMuxer and I used that.
2. I was able to accomplish this using mkvmerge

In both cases, I got the desired output (a single .mkv/.idx/.sub for 1 and a single .mkv for 2) and on my desktop I could see the expected subtitle tracks. However, in both cases XBMC could only see the first subtitle track. This is slightly better than the 2 .idx/.sub configuration I tried above in that I can get some subtitles, but it's obviously not ideal.

Has anyone gotten multiple subtitle tracks working in Eden? If so, what formats and configurations were used?

Thanks.
Alright, I feel kind of stupid now. When I was trying these workarounds, I was using my remote where I button configured to turn subtitles on or off. I was assuming this button would toggle through all the subtitle options (i.e., pushing it three times would switch between Off/Mongolian/English), however that was not the case. Instead, the button does what it said it would do Smile. Pushing it once turned on some subtitle track and pushing it again turned off the subtitles. If I went into the options on the OSD, I was able to switch between both subtitle tracks. I confirmed this worked for both workarounds Robotic suggested. There might still be a bug with the multiple .idx/.sub files, but I'm happy with these workarounds so I'm going to get back to ripping some Blu-rays.

Thanks again!
Try "NextSubtitle" in your keyboard.xml.
"Change to the next subtitle language, if there is more than one."
Thanks Live4Ever, I changed the mapping on my remote and that did the trick!