Ripping Blu-Rays II - Page 44

That's cool but clownBD and makeMKV are completely free. Is there any reason to pay for this particular program over the others?

1. I bought it a couple of years ago.
2. It works with the latest discs and protections.

... it's really up to you. You asked for verified ways to do it ... this works for me.

Am I missing something? Why not just use MakeMKV to create the file to funnel to the other programs to do the subtitles? Unless you're making a iso (or folder structure) archive, I don't see the point of using DVDFab.

Can you please explain this step? What exactly are you doing with MKVMergeGUI and how do you do it?

Too much work!

Click "Make MKV" start button.

Check in VLC
Find out which Subtitles track is for "Forced" . In this case it's the second English one (test in first lab meeting)

Open MKV in MKVMergeGUI v5.2.0 by clicking Add button
You will see 1 video, several audio, Subtitles (S_HDMV/PGS), and the chapters entry
- We know the second one is the Forced English Subtitles
Select it and on General Tab, change Forced track flag from no to Yes.
Check that there is room for the output file in folder. Use a new filename.
- Takes about 15 minutes.

Never did understand the Default" selection in the drop down menu in MKVMergeGUI. "Yes" makes it the default subtitle track and "Default" doesn't.

Handbrake now has the ability to burn in BR PGS subtitles (both regular and forced). It has been incorporated into the nightly build and from posts on other forums, it works quite well. Avatar with forced subtitles has been successfully transcoded with HB.

That works, but there is a much quicker way.

Open MKVMergeGUI
Select File -> Header Editor
In Header Editor, select File -> Open
Select your MKV file.
You'll now see the list of tracks. Open the subtitle track you want to be forced.
Click on "Forced Display" Flag.
In right window, set Current Value to "yes".
Select File -> Save

Takes a few seconds.

Does anybody know the difference; in other words what does the "Default" selection do? AFAICT it does nothing but I could be wrong.

It sets the value of the "default track" flag to its default value, which is "no".

Good information. That explains why I still wasn't getting forced subs to be the default. Choosing "Yes" always does.

Thanks. I will try it next time.

To be clear ... my way didn't take 15 minutes to change the option ... it takes about 15 minutes for the large file to re-write itself.

This method uses the GUI to run 'mkvpropedit', and changes the flag in-place.

The other method runs 'mkvmerge' and writes a new file. That's why it's slow.

Yes.

To OP: Add DVDFab to the list.

My .02 on ripping BDs...

Software I've used: DVDFab and MakeMKV

The only major factor I care to mention is that DVDFab analyzes a disc much quicker, than MakeMKV. Particularly, with discs containing MANY chapters and titles.

Example: Terminator 2 has too many of them. DVDFab scanned the entire disc in under a minute, while I gave up on MakeMKV after two minutes, and it was less than halfway through.

Does anybody have a listing that correlates the track numbers on the discs to the actual episode number? It is not straight forward as there's T00, T01, T03 then T07 and T08 of tracks that exceed 9Gb which are of course the episodes.

Having not seen this before, is there a way to tell which episode it is by viewing the first minute or so of each episode?

Some shows actually have the episode name at the very beginning, so I go by that. I know for DVDs you can play an episode and it will tell you with track it is, not sure if you can do the equivalent for a Blu ray

Guess I'll just need to wing it.. It is going to take a little time. I need to re-mux using mkvmerge to swap the subs so the forced tracks are default and not just the full English tracks too, as far as I can tell.

I think I'll assume they're in some sort of order, but who knows.

Probably stupid question

If I need to make a new MKV to incorporate forced subs (original did not have any subs at all), I can do this from the full disc copy folders I used DVDfab to male right? I don't have to do a new full disc rip?

Right. If you kept it, you can use it again, and do something different this time.

Depending on the series you may get lucky with the run times being able to be matched up. Also if you have a streaming service you could always match them up that way if they are available.

Bill

Thanks! At least that will save me 45 min or an hr.

Why didn't I think of that?

Here is a question for all you Clown_BD users. Is there some way to have Clown not extract the forced subs into a separate forced_sub track? There are not a whole lot of option checkboxes in the Clown GUI and I have not found one that will shut off this action. Can the batch file be edited to stop this?

Normally, I welcome this action since I use a WD Live player that doesn't have support for forced subs and so I have to specifically play the forced_sub track that Clown generates. Up until now, all the titles I have ripped had the forced subs embedded in the main subtitle track. The BD Star Wars releases have the forced subs already contained in their own separate track. When I rip the main title with Clown, it generates a duplicate of the forced_sub track and muxes it in the final .m2ts file. So now I have 3 subtitle tracks in the title, two of which are duplicate forced_sub tracks.

Anybody found a way to deal with this in Clown_BD?
Yes, I know I can use TSMUXER to remux the .m2ts file and pull out the duplicate forced_sub track, but I would rather nip it at the Clown_BD stage and avoid the extra post-processing.

If I remember correctly the Star Wars Blu-rays actually has 3 forced subtitle tracks (one for the main movie and for commentary). Not sure if this is part of the issue you are seeing (I use Clown but rip for Folder Structure, so it may be treated different)

You may want to look/post in the Movies with forced subtitles thread for more information.

As far as Star Ways Saga goes, it was consuming too much time for me to complete so I gave up on the project so I get to the honeydo list before she killed me. So if anybody has this accomplished send me a PM to help me get it done quicker. p)

I rip to BluRay folder structure also, it's all the same.

Yes, some of the Star Wars titles have multiple forced subs for the commentary, but I ignore those. I don't care about extras and commentary, etc. I'm a meat & potatoes movie guy. I rip only the main HD title, the English HD audio track and the main English subtitle track. Nearly all titles have multiple English subtitle tracks so I do a quick "pre-rip" of the disk. I run the first stage of Clown (eac3to) to rip only the English subtitles to the Demux folder then inspect/view the individual subtitle tracks. That way I can pick out the single main subtitle track for the full rip process. Clown_BD generated tracks for extracted forced subs (if they exist) are easily identified since they have "forced" appended to the track title. I can easily identify which track contains the forced subs.

When I've identified the main English subtitle track, I go back and run both stages of Clown_BD. This time when I get to the stream selection pop-up, I select the main HD title, the HD audio and the single English main subtitle track I identified in the pre-rip. If that main subtitle track contains forced subs, then they are extracted into a separate track during the first stage of the process and muxed in first in line. In that case the final .m2ts in the STREAM folder will contain 2 subtitle tracks: the main subtitle track I selected and a forced_sub track that Clown generated by extracting the forced subs from the main subtitle track.

There is the problem -- how to turn off the forced_sub extraction process so Clown_BD doesn't generate a separate forced_sub track during stage 1. The Star Wars disks already have the forced_subs extracted into a separate subtitle track and not embedded in the main subtitle track. When I do the rip, I select the main English subtitle track and the
forced_sub track that is already there. I don't want Clown_BD to generate yet another forced_sub track which is just a duplicate of the one that is already there. That's the issue I'm facing now.

So the issue is simple: How to tell Clown_BD to not to generate a separate forced_sub track during the first stage of processing.

I have a feeling I can edit the Clown_BD batch file to do this. Thankfully, it is a rare occurrence.

Thanks for the link. I don't really need it though since Clown_BD always tells me if there are forced subs in the title or not.

I don't know what you are trying to do with ripping the Star Wars saga that is causing you so much extra time. I don't find them to be any different from any other titles I've ripped to my NAS using my Clown_BD workstream. The issue I've outlined above with duplicate forced subtitle tracks is not something that must be eliminated for the final rip; it's just an annoyance because I'm anal about these things.

And that is it. I've gone through them once with MakeMKV, but was not satisfied with my results. I want to load them on MPC-HC through MB on my HTPC without having to set the correct sub stream so I need to do further work with mkvMerge or something to take out the sub streams I don't want and set the alien speach subs as default so they are automatically played as neccesary.

BTW, there's a spreadsheet in that link that'll tell you which sub stream is the one you want.