Western Digital - WD TV Live Media Player (WDTV2) - Page 195

You're correct MKV does have a separate PGS stream. I used DVD Fab to try this and set the forced subtitles but the WD TV Live still seems to require them to be manually turned on.

Is this your experience as well?

I demuxed the subtitles of about 50 (out of about 200) of my M2TS rips using TS Muxer and it seems things aren't as bad as I thought, only 4 of them had forced subs (that weren't burned into the video) 1 of which was a separate PGS track. So I think I'll leave the WDTV Live to subtitles off by default and just include a description in the folder like (sub) to remind me that subs have to be turned on for this file.

With that out of the way, I figure I have two choices, I can eliminate all extra subtitle tracks from my M2TS files that have forced subs and include an SRT track where there isn't a separate forced PGS track or I can go with MKVs just for these titles.

However, I don't quite understand what you mean with regard to MKVs and setting a subtitle track up as forced? Do you mean that you can set it to forced so that even if subtitles are turned off on my WDTV it will play them (which is what I want) or that it will only include forced subtitles in the subtitle track and omit all others.

In the case of DVD Fab it seems to do the second options, yes it only includes forced subtitles but it doesn't cause the WDTV live to play the forced subtitles unless I manually turn them off. In this scenario the only advantage is I don't have to demux the PGS stream and run it through OCR to create an SRT file. While this is a benefit in and of itself, using DVD Fab I get better quality with M2TS files than with MKVs as it makes constant bit rate MKVs whereas it makes variable bit rate M2TS files and there is the added benefit of not paying another $60 for extra module of DVD Fab.

Hi, I would have sent you a PM on this but you are not PM-enabled.

I'm also wondering what to do about forced subtitles and would prefer to use .m2ts files. I also have DVD Fab. When I do a BD rip of Avatar (main title only), DVD Fab includes a single subtitle stream which has all the subtitles -- normal and forced. To see the forced subtitles I have to enable subs on my player which then displays all the subtitles all the time throughout the movie. Are you saying that there is a way to use DVD Fab to do the BD rip and have it extract only the forced subtitles into the subtitle stream of the .m2ts?

Yes but you would have to use the blu-ray to mobile option which you have to pay an extra $60 for. Even then, it doesn't solve your problem completely as it will still not make the WDTV Live turn on the forced subs automatically (which is what I'm trying to address).

Using the blu-ray to blu-ray option in DVD Fab there is no option to rip only the forced subtitles. You have to use other tools to get around this. I'm not an authority on this and I myself am looking for a reasonable less time consuming solution.

What I did with Avatar was I copied the movie only compressed to the size of a dvd9 and kept DTS sound and the english subtitle track using DVDFab. I then used TS Muxer (free) to demux just the subtitle track in the M2TS file. Then I opened up this subtitle track in Suprip (also free) which separated the forced subtitles from the track. I then saved these forced subtitles as an SRT file. Thereafter you have two choices, you can either just add this SRT track to the same folder as your M2TS file which will result in you having both the PGS track available (with all subs) and this SRT track available with just the forced subs or you can run your rip of Avatar through Clown BD (also free) to strip out the PGS subtitle track to make only the SRT track available.

It sounds like a lengthy process but demuxing the subtitle track with TS Muxer takes about 2 minutes and if you don't get many errors that you have to manually correct using suprip doesn't take very long either. The biggest problem is that it's a manual process. I have a large collection and I'm looking for an easier solution to this mess myself.

The easiest thing to do is buy a player like the Dune which supports Blu-Ray ISO and be done with it. I'm planning to do just that but they have new players coming next month that I'm holding out for.

Thank you. I agree with your statement, but I'm willing to play with the apps you cite and give it a try, if for no other reason than as a learning experience.

I'm experimenting a bit with Clown BD as I think it may be possible to avoid creating SRT files and actually just create a new forced PGS subtitle file in cases like Avatar when the forced subtitles are embedded in the full subtitle track.

Having said that I still don't think there is anyway to force the track to play automatically in an M2TS file as M2TS is just a transport container. But if it's possible to retain the subtitle in PGS instead of SRT you can keep the subtitles looking as originally intended and avoid having to correct errors manually.

I'll keep you posted.

I'm not up on the differences between PGS and SRT subtitles. Would it be possible to demux the subtitle track from the .m2ts; create a new subtitle track containing only the forced subs in the same format; remux the new forced-only subtitle track back into the .m2ts.

As any standalone DVD player the LIVE's setting apparently overwrites that of any file itself. So if one uses the SETSTN command in a DVD to display a subtitle by default, when set to off the WD won't show it unless you select it manually.


MKV has a flag to do just that. However results still depend on how players interpret these flags and apparently the LIVE doesn't.

I'm still not entirely sure about what you want. Do you want the LIVE only to display subs when they are forced (not hardcoded into video) like in Avatar and with any regular movie only when selected manually? Also when ripping with DVDFab why not keep the pgs of the forced stream? Doesn't the LIVE support PGS in the meantime? Since SRTs still have that pointless transparent outline making them hardly readable sticking with image based subs might be the best way to go.

Also, if you really want to compress HD material you could also use free DVDfab to rip and free Handbrake to encode selecting only the forced sub stream.

I'm not concerned about subtitles burned into the video I'm worried about forced subtitles that are either in a standalone PGS stream or embedded in a PGS stream that contains other subtitles as well. What I want is to include only the forced subtitles and to have the player show them without any additional button clicking. I've pretty much found away to do everything except this last bit about havng them show up automatically. If MKV's on the WD TV Live will let me do that it may be worthwhile to re-rip the few movies that are affected. However, after trying this out in DVD Fab I'm not sure it's possible though I guess it may be possible using other tools. I understand that Ripbot will allow you to burn the subtitle track into the video so perhaps that's an option.

First to address your question, PGS subtitles are the original subtitles found on your disc, early on the WDTV Live could not read such subtitles. Until yesterday i hadn't figured out a way to retain only the forced subtitles contained in a PGS track so I would demux the PGS tracks in TS Muxer and then save them as an SRT file.

However, after poking around the internet I fount that you can just edit the PGS file to include only the forced subs. All you really need is to do a one step process in Clown BD but I prefer to use a three step process to make sure I avoid any errors.

Short tutorial for including only forced PGS subtitles in an M2TS file:

(Tools required: Clown BD, TsMuxer (with GUI), SupRip

Step 1:
- Start TS Muxer
- Add the M2TS file
- Uncheck the boxes for everything but the subtitle tracks (i.e. remove video and audio)
- Select demux
- Pick a destination for your file.

Step 2:
- Start SupRip
- Open the demuxed subtitle tracks one at a time and check if there are any forced subtitles.
- If there aren't any don't worry about it there's nothing left for you to do.
- If there are forced subtitles go to the next step (in my case the next step seems to be required in about 5% of cases)

Step 3:
- Start Clown BD
- Add your M2TS file
- Make sure to the checkmark is on for forced subtitles
- Uncheck the box for TS Muxer (so it doesn't automatically remux anything)
- Start the process.
- Once completed, check the output files, you will see that it created a separate forced subtitle track. The exception to this rule is cases such as Apocalypto where all the subtitles are needed but are not identified as forced and others where the relevant subtitles are in a separate track like in Gran Torino. This is why step 2 is important to make sure you can identify this.
- Open TS Muxer and add the video file, audio file, and only the forced subtitles (or the complete track in cases like Apocalypto and Gran Torino).
- select m2ts as your output and that's pretty much it.

The end result works well except that you still have to manually turn on the subtitle track but this way you don't have to worry about which is the correct track, nor do you have the problem of displaying all subtitles instead of just forced subtitles. An easy way to address this is to indicate sub in the folder name as a reminder to turn subs on - e.g. Gran Torino (sub).

EVT, this looks really great. Thanks for doing the legwork on this. Hopefully I'll be getting a chance at home to try this out in the next day or two. I follow this WD thread (among others) to learn and keep abreast of things but I don't have the WD Live player. My Seagate FAT+ has always been able to display PGS subtitles in the .m2ts, just not handle forced subs properly -- it's been all or nothing. If this procedure works for me, it will remove the only remaining functional limitation of BD playback on the FAT+ that I have not been able to satisfactorily work around. I don't mind at all having to press a button to turn on a subfile stream -- beats spending 2-3X for a player that does it automatically. Thanks, again.

The truth is that even if you spend 2-3X more for a player unless you redo your rips into ISO or blu-ray folder structure no player is capable of recognizing forced subtitles in an M2TS file. I also believe that the best of the best among media players (Dune and PCH C-200) also cannot respect a forced flag in an MKV file (though I guess this could be fixed down the road) so if you've done a fair bit of leg work to rip blu-ray's to M2TS there really isn't anything you can buy that will improve the experience as far as subtitles go.

Anyway, I hope this helps.

Here is another tutorial that works as well for those using mkv files.

http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=16784

Thanks for the tip, the only problem with this option seems to be that handbrake is quite time consuming. On the other hand, few of my blu-rays are affected so it might be worth the trouble for this.

I haven't ever used handbrake, is there an option to avoid any further video compression and just burn in the forced subtitles? If so, this really could be the best option of all.

Which I do, actually. DVD Fab rips the main title to the BDMV folder structure and that's how I leave it. The extra space taken up by all the pointers and playlist is minuscule. The advantage for me is that the FAT+ recognizes the BDMV folder structure and displays the root folder name as the title. That gives me a clean listing of BD titles in the FAT+ menu without any appending .m2ts or .iso extensions. Hence my interest in retaining the .m2ts file and just replacing the subtitle track with one that contains only the forced subs.

I see, with the WDTV Live you have to drill down into the stream folder which means many button clicks so I just kept the M2TS file. You're method will serve you far better in the long run as a player like the Dune should be able to pick up the forced subtitle flag from a blu-ray structure.

Not with Handbrake. For now, I just skip the "burn-in"/Handbrake step to retain the original quality and remember to set the subs on. :-/

Just wish the WDTV Live would recognize the forced flag, as mentioned here previously.

the WD site no longer has the beta firmware, is there another place that i can get it, thanks.

never mind, found it thx

That's too bad about handbrake. So really then there isn't much of an advantage to going down this route over sticking with M2TS as far as forced subtitles are concerned. My understanding is that MakeMKV doesn't include a flag to force subtitles on anyway.

Guys I wAs trying to play stargate iso bd with dots HD m 7.1 but my receiver showed meanly 5.1' what and why we are not getting all 7.1channels down mixed?

WDTV Live will only pass through the DTS core track which is just a 5.1 track.

Darn it! It did sound awesome but I wish I could do 7.1? Which other MP can pass through 7.1? And btw can WDTV live can pass through full bit rate true HD?

On another note, what do you guys use to edit an MKV or M2TS for that matter? I'd like to fiddle around with (forced) subs but to save (muxing) time a 1 min clip would be preferable. I understand there's no tool so far that can set start/end frames on HD content as DVD Shrink does in reauthor mode?

Yes

Sometimes. Sometimes I have to revert to original FW to get some titles to
work.

BTW,

I've done some more fiddling around with DVD FAB to MKV and found that you can burn in the subtitles to the video. However, identifying forced subtitles is still a bit of a crapshoot. It's easy in a case like Avatar which has just one subtitle track in english but something like the Godfather where the forced subs are in a separate english subtitle track, it's up to you to identify that track.

I wonder if there is a way to rip just the subs first and review what's in them before ripping. What I like about DVD Fab is its quite fast as it works with CUDA acceleration. In my case I've only got CUDA decoding working (not encoding) and I ripped Avatar while burning in the subtitles to a 12GB file in under 2 hours.

This is interesting stuff, do you know if you can burn the subs in and still maintain the original video file? I would imagine that it must recode to H.264 or something in order to do this, which is why I have avoided it.

Also, if burning in a subtitle track that has forced elements, are only the 'forced' subtitles burned into the video so that you can still manually turn the regular subs on and off?

Thanks, this is good information, especially as DVD Fab provides a 30 day trial, I could probably just install it and get all of my forced movies done this way without having to purchase a license. I'm anticipating an even better feature set from Clone BD when it (hopefully) comes out next year so I'd like to avoid buying too many more software licenses (already have lifetime on Clone DVD and Any DVD).

I haven't tried maintaining the original file but to tell you the truth it can't be possible. There has to be some re-encoding in order to burn in the subtitles.

It looks like the only way to burn in subtitles is to only have one stream selected and select forced only so no I don't think you could retain the rest of them in order to be able to turn them off and on.

Forget about using the trial version of DVDFAB though, it places a watermark with the DVDFAB logo which comes on and off intermittently. I'm just trying to figure out if it's worth buying but the rips I've done while trying it out are essentially useless.

When I want a shorter clip for testing, I use the feature of DVD Fab that lets me start/stop a rip on a chapter boundary. So if you choose your chapter well you could get a short one.

For MKVs, I use the Split feature in MKVToolNix:

http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkv...l#global_split

For example, if you want to splice out the video to give you content in the range of 45 - 143 seconds in the whole video, you should first enable 'Splitting' in the 3rd tab (Global options), and click on the radio button for the Timecodes. Entering 45s,143s after making sure that 'Link Files' option is turned off (it is off by default), and then clicking on 'Start Muxing' will give you 3 MKV files with -001.mkv, -002.mkv and -003.mkv extensions. The video in -002.mkv is what you would be interested in. You can also enter multiple timecodes separated by commas, and the number of MKV files generated varies accordingly.

To whom it may concern, here with screenshots.