[skylarking]

I have a selection of movies in MKV format and have checked each movie to ensure that the correct subtitle stream flag is defined appropriately.

The method i use for checking the correct subtitle is selected is to watch a portion of the movie using VLC, if the subtitle is incorrect, i determine which subtitle stream is correct within VLC.
I then set the appropriate subtitle stream using mkvmergeGUI and the header editor contained within and then recheck within VLC.
My preference is that no subtitles are shown other than when forced subtitles are present.

Forced subtitles for example are when English is the predominant spoken language and an English audio stream is selected and during period of foreign language being spoken within the the film English subtitles are shown only during this period....

However, XBMC seems to ignore the subtitle stream settings within the MKV file. It seems XBMC always shows the subtitle stream or remembers the last manually applied subtitle setting from my previous viewing where i set the subtitle either on or off.

So my question is:

1) Can i set XBMC to not save the subtitle settings since i see such manual settings (via audio settings) as temporarily when watching a film ?
2) Does XBMC look at the subtitle default track flag, track enabled flag and forced display flag within the MKV file and use these settings?

[edited to fix title dislexic typing]

[skylarking]

OK, it seems XBMC saves the status (within its database) of whether the subtitle was enabled or not via the "audio settings" menu when watching a given film. That saved 'per movie subtitle status' can be be wiped from the database by un-selecting "Enable Subtitles" and then pressing the "Set as default for all videos" button. This is a clunky method at best.

I believe this is counter intuitive to how all DVD players work, that is, the player honors the stream setting in combination with the player setting. This means if i set my player language to Italian, it will play the Italian audio stream if it exists, but if it does no exist the player will play the default audio stream (usually English) and the Italian subtitle stream if it exists. If i over-ride this standard behavior by selecting the French audio stream and Italian subtitle stream when playing a specific movie, this is not remembered between sessions and the player will always default to its normal behavior when the same movie is played again. And the concept of disabling embedded subtitles with subtitle flags that tell the player what to do is not logical.

BD players operate in much the same way as DVD players.

Now some people use separate subtitle files that contain the subtitle information for their movie so obviously this a different (and odd) use case compared to embedded subtitle streams. But even these odd use cases need to be handled differently than i suspect they are handled currently. For example, the subtitle files and the associated flags (default, forced, etc) should be specified at movie import to mimic the embedded streams via .nro files so that when watching the movie the appropriate subtitle file will be automatically selected and then the viewer can temporarily changed the stream which should not be remembered within the database (much as embedded streams are handled by DVD players today)!

Being that all my movies have embedded subtitle streams and that all my players have behaved in this tradition manner as outlined, i do not want per movie subtitle information stored in the database.

So how can i set XBMC to not save subtitle stream info that is temporarily set via the audio settings menu when watching the movie? Is it even possible?

If this is not currently possible, how does one go about highlighting such an improvement to the developers?

[Ned Scott]

Check out this add-on that is currently in testing: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=153783

Works awesome for tweaking subtitle and audio selection.