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Full Version: Forced Subtitles Not Always Flagged?
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I use MakeMKV to rip all my Blurays and DVDs and have always included both the forced English subtitles and the full English subtitles. I've discovered however, that the forced subtitles are not always flagged and will not show up until I select that specific subtitle. For example, in Game of Thrones Season 2 Daenerys is speaking to the Dothraki and the subtitles did not show up. It was easy enough to go into the player controls and select the correct subtitle, but it's a pain to have to do this with every movie. Setting it as the default for all movies doesn't seem to work. The full full subtitles show up.

I read that you this can be fixed with MKVMerge, but when I tried this, I couldn't figure out which subtitle was the forced one. The only difference in their title and description was their ID number, but that doesn't help me. It did look like neither one of them were flagged so there does seem to be a problem with MakeMKV not consistently flagging the forced subtitle.

My questions:

1) Is there an easier way to do this, i.e. is there a way to force subtitles within XBMC?

2) If MKVMerge is my only option, how do I know which subtitle is the forced one?

3) Is there a way to do this in a batched manner instead of each title individually?
The subs are likely to show up in the same order as they do in xbmc and mediainfo and indeed when you ripped with makemkv.

As far as batching is concerned, mkvmerge gui (on linux anyway) has a "copy to clipboard" button which copies the command line that will be run. This command line could be put in a batch file.
As nickr has stated- the subs are likely to appear in the same order in the file as they do in xbmc/mediainfo. If you wanted to check you could use BDSub2Sub to confirm which of the tracks was the 'forced' one. but in my experience the first method of recognition hasn't let me down yet.

To change the flag to forced, open mkvmerge\header editor - load the file and identify the subtitle stream, change to 'forced' and save.

There is an app for batch processing headers in mkv files - JMkvpropedit.