Clarification on MKV forced subtitles
#1
Hello all,

I appreciate there are a lot of discussions on this subject but after a few hours of searching I am unable to find the exact answer I am looking for. I would like to make sure I'm doing things right before re-ripping my entire Blu-Ray collection.

From what I can make out Blu-Ray forced subtitles (for example the alien language in District 9) can be implemented in 3 ways.

1) Burned in to the video
2) Separate subtitle track
3) Combined with the standard subtitle track but each forced caption has a "forced" flag set

District 9 uses option 3. So far I have been unable to get XBMC to recognise the caption forced flags from the .sup files when they are merged into an MKV file using MKVMerge.

The method that appears to work is to use BDSupToSub to produce a dedicated track that contains only forced subtitles (using the /forced option) and use MKVMerge's "--forced-track TID" to set that entire track as forced. This way I can have my movie library set to disable subtitles by default, but any foreign or alien Wink language captions are shown.

Am I right in thinking XBMC is able to identify a forced subtitle track but is unable to identify individual forced captions within a track?

Thanks in advance!
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#2
Can anyone help with this at all?

Any help would be much appreciated!
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#3
Bump.

I'd like to know too before I re-Rip everything!:confused2:

Or would it be better to find the forced subtitles from the xbmc subtitle add-on? Is there a source for just forced subtitles in that list?
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#4
This is something I would love to know to!
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#5
Option 3. IIRC, this was something fixed in XBMC v11, so the forced flag should work now. However, I don't have any files (with subs that have the forced flag) handy at the moment, so I can't confirm 100%.
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#6
What I have been doing for years is the following:

Rip using www.makemkv.com, free program, but I paid for a license
Rip movie, tag hd audio track, untag all subtitles, but KEEP ALL Forced English subtitles (35 min to rip)
After rip, compress usign ripbot (goes from 10-30gb down to 4-12gb roughly, keep hd audio track and 1080p also) (2-6 hours to compress pending hardware, mine is amb phenom quad core 3.4 with 8gb ram, my crappy cpu's will take a full 24 hours to compress).
Then, subtitles just simply work, show up when they should, and no merging or anythign special needs to happen.

Keep in mind, however, that on occasion, I have lost the subtitles during a compression, not sure why, but it has happened.
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#7
I posted here

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=128653

But the jist is, my forced subs do not seem to be working. I'm loathe to rerip them all again. These were huge huge bluray remuxes, and I know the forced flag works!

It's option 3 as in the original post but I've no idea why it's not working.
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#8
Just download the forced subs from one of the online subtitle databases.

text-based subs look nicer anyway
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#9
I can do that, but since they're defiantely on the file, and they should be working I was wondering if I'm doing something wrong, is it broken etc
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#10
(2011-06-25, 22:00)gazman Wrote: Hello all,

I appreciate there are a lot of discussions on this subject but after a few hours of searching I am unable to find the exact answer I am looking for. I would like to make sure I'm doing things right before re-ripping my entire Blu-Ray collection.

From what I can make out Blu-Ray forced subtitles (for example the alien language in District 9) can be implemented in 3 ways.

1) Burned in to the video
2) Separate subtitle track
3) Combined with the standard subtitle track but each forced caption has a "forced" flag set

District 9 uses option 3. So far I have been unable to get XBMC to recognise the caption forced flags from the .sup files when they are merged into an MKV file using MKVMerge.

The method that appears to work is to use BDSupToSub to produce a dedicated track that contains only forced subtitles (using the /forced option) and use MKVMerge's "--forced-track TID" to set that entire track as forced. This way I can have my movie library set to disable subtitles by default, but any foreign or alien Wink language captions are shown.

Am I right in thinking XBMC is able to identify a forced subtitle track but is unable to identify individual forced captions within a track?

Thanks in advance!


Im a bit confused.. When I rip from MakeMKV if the movie has forced Subs I just leave the box checked. Then XBMC will play if I have subs enabled. Is this something that doesn't work for you?

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#11
(2012-04-14, 15:41)BORIStheBLADE Wrote: Im a bit confused.. When I rip from MakeMKV if the movie has forced Subs I just leave the box checked. Then XBMC will play if I have subs enabled. Is this something that doesn't work for you?

There are 10 sub tracks, in each language. Each has forced subs as part of it.

I.e. if it's on the whole show it'll do the English and foreign speaking parts, if it's off it does nothing not even the foreign language parts.
The flags are definately there though.
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#12
XBMC currently does not support forced subtitles in PGS streams (what you get from a Blu-ray/HD-DVD disc). I don't personally rip to MKV, so I'm not that familiar with it, but from what I understand the forced flag in MKV just tells XBMC to enable the subtitle stream even if the default preference is to have subtitles disabled. In other words, it does not cause XBMC to pick out the particular subtitles which are marked as forced within the stream.

I'm working on putting together a build of XBMC Eden geared towards playing rips of my Blu-ray collection, and I have implemented the forced flag in the PGS decoder (tested with Avatar). I've mostly been testing on the raw unmodified mpls/m2ts files you get from a Blu-ray disc, but I don't see why it wouldn't work on MKVs. If you guys would like to try it, I've posted the links in the following thread: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=128935
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Clarification on MKV forced subtitles0