Help me get Forced Subtitles to work once and for all

I've never been able to get Forced Subtitles to work the way I want them to. I've read every thread on every message board I could find relating to Forced Subtitles, and nothing seems to work for me.

The way I want it to work is how I imagine most people want it to work: do not display subtitles for regular movies in English, unless there is a forced foreign language section, then automatically display that subtitle (Avatar, Star Wars, John Carter, Captain America, etc.)

Here's what actually happens: I'm watching a movie, then a character starts speaking in a foreign language, and I think "Hey, I've seen this movie before and I think there's subtitles for this part!" So I have to grab the keyboard, pause the movie, exit out of fullscreen mode, right-click on the DirectVobSub icon in the System Tray, select Show Subtitles (and sometimes also seem to have to go into Preferences and uncheck Hide Subtitles under the Misc. tab), and randomly select one of the (usually several) English Subtitles shown in the menu. I then return to the movie, rewind it a bit, and play the scene again. Inevitably I will have picked the wrong subtitle track (either inadvertently enabling the full dialog English track, or a director's commentary subtitle, etc.) and I have to repeat the Exit Movie > Go to DirectVobSub Menu > Pick Another Subtitle > Rewind the Movie > Play Again, etc. until I find the correct Forced Subtitle track. As you can imagine, this pretty much ruins the immersive experience of watching a movie for me and my wife or guests.

Here's my current ripping/playback process and setup:

• I rip a Blu-ray using MakeMKV. I generally select ALL of the English Subtitles (since there's no deeper labeling of them than "English", there's no way to tell which is the actual foreign language subtitle track), placing checks next to both the English Subtitle track, as well as English (Forced Only) boxes. This may be the root of my issue, since apparently MakeMKV (as great as it is) seems to be buggy in regards to subtitle extraction. I've read that MakeMKV does not properly set the Forced Subtitle flag on those tracks, for example.

• I play back the resulting MKV using WMC7 and DirectVobSub. My system uses LAV Video, Audio, and Splitter Filters (via Shark's 007 codec pack). Believe me, I have also tried every other playback system I've heard of to solve this issue, including XBMC, MPC-HC, VLC, JRiver, KMPlayer, etc. and they all have different subtitle issues, so I'd prefer to stick with the simplicity of WMC7 + Media Browser.

• In DirectVobSub, I usually have to set the Preferences > Misc > Hide Subtitles option to ON, otherwise every movie displays subtitles for the duration of the movie, which is not what I want.

I imagine that my setup is pretty similar to a lot of people's, and I know I'm not the only one who struggles with Forced Subtitles.

Here are some other things I've tried:

• I've looked at individual .MKV files using MKVToolnix, and tried to make sure the Forced Subtitle flag was On. This means a laborious workflow of using the Movies With Forced Subtitles document to try to help identify movies with foreign passages. Then you have to figure out with specific Track ID is the Forced Subtitle, which means using MKVToolnix again (possible even the command line version!) to isolate the correct track, and either delete the other subtitle tracks altogether and remux the MKV, or see if setting the Forced Subtitle flag works (it never does.) This isn't an appetizing method and one I wouldn't want to go through on every movie I have, plus it doesn't seem to make a different in playback functionality anyway. The Forced Subs still don't display automatically.

• I've tried using entirely different playback systems, such as XBMC (also handles Subtitles poorly) and using MPC-HC/MadVR which offers alternative options for Always Loading Subtitles, and keyboard shortcuts for cycling through them. I also couldn't get this method to work, and I had other unrelated issues with MPC-HC (my system freezes if I ever try to seek on the timeline or rewind/fastforward, forcing me to Force Quit the app every time.) So I've gone back to WMC7 + Media Browser every time.

• I've considered throwing my hands in the air and faced going through all 700+ titles in my library, DELETING all of the embedded Subtitle tracks in ALL of my titles so that I could keep DirectVobSub running with Show Subtitles all of the time, and then manually locating and downloading Forced Subtitle tracks from an internet database and hope I have better luck auto-loading external subtitle .srt files. This process would take weeks as I'd have to sit through the ~30 minute remuxing of all of my movies (not just the ones with foreign subtitles) in order to delete all of the embedded subtitle tracks that I embedded in the MKV over several months of ripping. And even if that worked, I'd have to tolerate the obnoxious (THIS SUBTITLE TRACK PROVIDED BY 2LIVECREW!!!) credit nonsense that people seem to add to subtitle tracks posted to internet databases. I've also had syncing issues during experimenting with external subtitle files sourced online.

So, given the above scenario, can anyone with a similar ripping/playback scenario describe their FOOL-PROOF method of automatically displaying Forced Subtitles in their MKVs?

Thanks,
R

Oh, I suppose it's worth mentioning that my ideal method would NOT involve burning subtitles into the video. While I don't mind the concept of burned subtitles, what I absolutely don't want to do is recompress a rip in Handbrake. All of my rips are 100% lossless quality video/audio, and I don't want to sacrifice quality (even a little bit) by recompressing a video to burn in the subs. Not to mention the 8-10 hours per title it would take Handbrake to re-encode the entire film. There has to be a better and reliable software-based method. I'm fairly technically savvy so it's also a little disheartening reading about all the people who have no issues with subtitles at all (granted they are probably using different ripping/playback methods than me.) I have to imagine there are a lot of people out there with the same issue I have.

@glorspd I started going down that road in my last attempt as well (using Subrip to manually inspect each subtitle track in order to find the Forced one) and then trying to remux it back in. But it felt very labor- and time-intensive, I had to start writing down each step of the process (using MKVToolnix here, then use Subrip there, then back to MKVmerge, etc.) since I know I'd have no idea how to repeat the process if I waited even a couple of weeks in between. It wasn't a process I looked forward to going through with all of my movies. So I ended up abandoning that approach in hopes of a more elegant software solution (I experimented with MPC-HC and MadVR next, but had a different set of issues mentioned above), so I returned here to create this thread to see if anyone had a fool-proof method of getting it done with software. I've spent months trying to figure out a system that works.

So assuming I can work out the correct demux/remux process and strip out all of the subs except the known-Forced one, are you then using DirectVobSub at all? Or are you just using MPC-HC/LAV and that ends up working for you? Also, did you have to modify all your movies that DON'T have Forced Subtitles so that MPC/LAV don't display the regular (non-Foriced) embedded PSG subs at all times, or do the "Only Load/Display Forced Subtitles" actually work in those apps?

It seems like apps like DirectVobSub are explicitly written and intended for cases like mine, so it's just frustrating that it's not working (for me, at least.) And you're right, there's no way a program like MakeMKV could intelligently know which tracks are which—the only method I could think of is a crowd-sourced database that could automatically select the right Forced track based on the Blu-Ray title ID, but that would take a lot of development time and probably isn't something that's important enough to everyone for the developer to bother with.

-R

Wanted to follow up in this thread to report my outcome on finally solving this issue for my personal HTPC setup. The good news is I finally have Forced Subs working, the bad news is it wasn't easy to fix and involved a fair amount of manual labor because my collection was so large. But, if you never want to be bothered by foreign language subtitles not working automatically, it's worth the effort to fix... once and for all.

Some of this information is already documented in other threads (on AVS Forum and elsewhere) and mentioned even in this thread, but I'm going to include the steps I used in case someone finds this update helpful.

My basic goal was to have my playback system (WMC7 + Media Browser) display Forced Subtitles automatically without having to fiddle with apps like DirectVobSub (which still required me to Pause the movie and enable the right Subtitle track with trial and error), and certainly not having to permanently burn in subs with Handbrake (which would require multi-hour re-encoding and some loss of quality—if negligible—to the original file.)

As has been mentioned here, the problem I was experiencing wasn't necessarily in the playback software (which many people have reported no problems with), but was due to the original ripping process. I, like many, used MakeMKV to rip my 800+ title collection to lossless-quality MKVs. MakeMKV is great, but unfortunately does not handle Forced Subtitles well at all. When I ripped my titles, I always checked all of the "Forced Subtitle (English)" streams on the disc, and for most of them also checked regular non-forced English subtitles. That means I had to dutifully go back in to every title I have with foreign language passages, and "fix" the forced subtitles to correctly display. Here's the process I used:

Note on Playback Software

First, to note my playback software setup: I am using Media Browser as a front end for WMC7. While I haven't gone back to see if the native WMC7 player will now work after going through this process, I did end up switching to MPC-HC as an External Player (defined through the Advanced tab of Media Browser Configuration) as it had more settings related to subtitles. I'm also using LAV Filters only, configured as External Filters in MPC-HC (look elsewhere for a guide on how to do this, it's fairly easy.) I also happen to be using madVR as the DirectShow Video renderer in MPC-HC, but this doesn't have any bearing on the subtitles and is optional. In any case, I can't guarantee this method will work for any other software configurations.

My LAV Splitter settings are as follows:



Note the "eng:eng|f;eng:off;*:eng" setting for Subtitles, and I didn't need to specify anything under the PGS setting.

Determine the Movies in Your Collection with Foreign Language Subtitles

The first step in fixing Forced Subs on already-ripped MKVs is to determine which of your titles have Forced Subs. The best way to begin is to consult the Movies With Forced Subtitles thread here on AVS. If you Google it, you'll find a couple of versions of this spreadsheet, one is locked from Editing, and one is open for Editing. Unfortunately the two documents are in different states at this point, so you'll need to consult them both to build a comprehensive list of movies in your library that have Forced Subs. I made a Text Edit document with all of my movies to fix as a "To-Do" list, as this process will take several days of effort for large collections. I used color-coding for titles like To Be Fixed, Titles that are Fixed, and Titles that were on the Movies with Forced Subtitles list but ended up having Burned-in Subs and therefore didn't need fixing. Because I had so many titles to go through, this system just gave me a nice, quick visual indicator of my progress over the several days it took me to go through them all.

Identify the Forced Subtitle Track in Each MKV

Once you've got your list of movies to tackle, the next step is to go through them one-by-one to determine which of the embedded subtitle tracks is the Forced Subtitle. It will be different for every single movie, so this is where the manual labor begins. You'll need to install MKVToolNix for sure, and then grab any GUIs you need (I personally am not as comfortable or fast using the command line). I grabbed both MKVExtractGUI-2 and MKVMerge GUI. You'll probably want both.

I would first start with MKVExtractGUI on an MKV, since it's stripped down in features and pretty straightforward:

—Once you've selected your MKV as the Input File, you'll see all the Track numbers for video, audio, and subtitles.

—Select all of the subtitle tracks and hit Extract, and it will create individual .SUP files for each track in the Output directory you've specified (I just used the Desktop for simplicity) and will begin the process of de-muxing the MKV to extract those tracks as files. Unfortunately it takes about 10-15 minutes to do this, BUT you can run multiple instances of the GUI (or command line) on a few different titles on your list if you want to multi-task.

Here's a screenshot showing MKVExtractGUI pulling the .SUP files out of a title, and a Windows Explorer window showing the files it's placed on the Desktop. Note that the filenames created by MKVExtract do not correlate to the true Track #s in the MKV. This will be important later.



NOTE: MKVExtractGUI is buggy. On several titles, you'll get a screenshot like the one below where there are some tracks with a title that reads "Track:, [eng]". If you see this, MKVExtractGUI will not be able to rip the subtitles from this MKV. If you select the subtitle tracks and hit Extract, it will immediately report "Extracted OK", but will not actually create the .SUP files. If you have any MKVs with tracks that look like the below screenshot, you're going to need to use MKVMerge GUI instead* (see below).



Now that you've got direct access to the .SUP tracks from your MKV, you need to identify which one is the Forced Subtitle (the others will be subtitles like Director's commentary, English for the Hearing Impaired, etc.) The easiest way to identify the Forced Subtitle is to find the .SUP with the smallest file size. In all of my titles, there was never an instance where the smallest file was NOT the Forced Subtitle. Here, in an example file, you can see that out of all the .SUPs pulled from this MKV of The Incredibles, the Forced Subtitle is pretty obvious: it's the 53KB one, because there are literally only 4 lines of foreign dialog in the movie.



Not all of the Forced Subs you rip will be this easy to identify, so you'll want to download Subtitle Edit to open the files and ensure you've got the right file by reading a few lines of dialog. It should be pretty obvious whether you've got the right file or not (see below screenshot for an example of Subtitle Edit I used for visual confirmation):



Make sure the Forced Subtitle Flag is Enabled

Now that you've identified the exact Subtitle Track from your MKV, the next step is to use MKVMerge GUI's Header Editor to change the 'Forced display' flag to YES, and turn off all the other ones.

Here's where it can get tricky, though: when you extracted those .SUP files, MKVExtract created file names with "dumb" sequential track names (i.e. "The Incredibles_track3_eng.sup", then "_track4_", then "_track5_" and so on.) These track numbers in the file name do NOT necessarily correlate to the Track #s you will see in MKVMerge. In the screenshot below, you can see that while the extracted .SUP files are numbered 3-7 sequentially, the actual subtitle Track #s in the MKV are numbered 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11! Argh!



So how can we correlate which .SUP is which track in MKVMerge? Simple: count them. The correct track, as noted earlier, is the smallest one in the extracted .SUP files on the Desktop. If you count them out, the fourth file in Windows Exporer, track # 6, is the Forced Subtitle. Now, if you count down 4 Subtitle Tracks in MKVMerge, the fourth Subtitle track listed there is Subtitle track 9! That's the one you want to work with. Not very elegant, but this "counting method" worked for me every time.

To use the Header Editor in MKVMerge to turn this track back on, first make sure you load your MKV into the HEADER EDITOR of MKVMerge, NOT as in Input File in the initial GUI screen:

—Open MKVMerge GUI, ignore the Input window you see.
—Go to File> Header editor (or hit CTRL-E)
—This will open up a second modal dialog box
—Go to File > Open and select your MKV, and it will populate with all the embedded, video, audio, and subtitle tracks in the file.
—Open up the Subtitle track you counted down to (fourth one down in this example, which is Subtitle track 9) by clicking the "+" icon.
—Under 'Forced display' flag, change the Current Value to yes. (If it was no, this is exactly where/why your subtitles weren't working)
—For safety, I also changed the current value flags of 'Default track' and 'Track enabled' to yes as well
—For even MORE safety, I went into EVERY other subtitle track and changed the current value to 'NO' for all three settings. Just to be sure. These steps are what I believe makes it so LAV Splitter doesn't need to invoke its extra "Deliver Forced Subtitles" only features, etc, which I could never get to work.

Once all the tracks values are correctly set, hit File > Save. DON'T FORGET TO DO THIS, it's easy to forget and just close the window, but if you forget, you're going to wonder why subtitles still aren't working. The nice thing about this step, even though it took awhile to get to it, is that it saves the MKV instantly. It doesn't have to re-mux it, which could take 30+ minutes per title.

*If MKVExtract GUI doesn't work: If you run across a title that MKVExtract GUI could not process (roughly half of my collection could not be processed this way), you'll need to use MKVMerge GUI instead:

1) Open MKVMerge GUI and add your MKV to the Input files window.
2) Select all the subtitle tracks ("S_") and deselect everything else.
3) Specify an Ouput filename, and hit Start muxing. This will create an .MKS file in your Output directory.
4) Open the .MKS file in Subtitle Edit, and you'll be prompted to open a particular track embedded in the file. Open each one to determine which is the foreign language track.
5) Make note of the foreign language track (using the "counting method" as described above, because unfortunately the Track # here will not correlate to the Track # in MKVMerge's Header Editor.)
6) Load the MKV into MKVMerge's Header Editor, and follow the steps above for changing the "current value" of the Forced, Default, and Enabled flags below.

Verify Your Subtitles Work

Now, load your MKV back up into your player and fast forward to the time-code of where the first subtitle appears, and if everything has been configured correctly, you should see your Forced Subtitle appear with NO user input needed, no awkward fumbling for the remote control in the middle of a movie to find the right track and switch over to it, etc. Congratulations!

Alternate Method for Troublesome MKVs:

There are going to be times when, for whatever reason, the above process doesn't work. Out of the 50 or so titles I had to fix in my collection, there were a few that required a heavier hand to fix. In most cases, the above process will work, but when it doesn't, you need to get a little more extreme:

For troublesome titles, you can use the following process of obliterating your MKVs embedded subtitle tracks, and replacing them with a known-good subtitle track from an online database:

1) Go to subscene.com and enter your movie title. Click on the search result of the correct movie and you'll be presented with a long list of available subtitles. Find the ones in English, and read the descriptions, which will hopefully indicate "Foreign dialog only" or "Forced subs" or something along those lines. I was always able to find the file I was looking for. Download this file.

2) The file will probably be in .SRT format. You need to convert it to .SUP format so you can mux it back into your MKV. Open the .SRT in Subtitle Edit and you should see all the subtitles. This is where you can verify that you're only seeing the foreign dialog of the movie, and not English for the Hearing Impaired, etc. You may also use this time to delete any "credits" that are often inserted into these files if you choose, often at the very beginning of the file, giving credit to whoever provided the subtitles.

3) Export these subs as an .SUP file by going to File > Export > Blu-ray sup...

4) Optionally, at this point, you can adjust the font, size or color of the subs if you wish. I would usually increase the Font size to about 40-50, but you'll have to find settings to your own liking. You can use the defaults to start with.

5) Choose "Export all lines..." and choose a filename and location you will remember. After a few moments of exporting, the file will be ready. Now we need to stick this file into your MKV ("re-mux" it).

6) Open MKVMerge GUI and specify your MKV in the Input File window (click "add", then find your MKV).

7) Click "add" again and now find and select the .SUP file you just exported from Subtitle Edit.

8) In the "Tracks, chapters and tags:" window, you will see a list of all the MKV's embedded video, audio, and subtitle tracks, as well as the new .SUP file you exported.

9) UNCHECK all the tracks that begin with "S_" (those are the subtitle tracks, naturally.) This is going to strip out and remove ALL of the subtitle tracks in your MKV so there is NO confusion.

10) Place a CHECK next to the .SUP file you exported (probably noted as a "PGS" track.) This is going to insert your known-good subtitle track into the MKV, in place of all the ones you're stripping out.

11) Click on the subtitle track you imported, and below the file window under "General Track Options", change "Language:" to eng (English), change Forced Track Flag: to YES. This is so you won't have to use the Header Editor later to change the Forced value, etc. to yes.

12) Specify an Output filename and location, and hit "Start muxing". This process will probably take about 7-10 minutes to create your new MKV.

13) Once the new MKV has been written, open it in your playback system and verify that the subtitles are working. It's a good idea to fast-forward to several different locations in the movie, to ensure no timing / lip-syncing problems were in the subtitle file. If there are any mis-timings (this subtitle file you downloaded came from some random person on the internet, you know), you'll have to go back and adjust the time codes in Subtitle Edit youself. Out of ~50 titles, I think I had to do this once, so it shouldn't be a big concern.

14) If the new MKV works and timing / lip-syncing is good throughout, replace your original MKV with this new, corrected one.

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If you're dealing with an already-ripped library, fixing all your titles is going to take some time, but for me it was worth it to have a smoother movie-watching experience. Don't forget you'll have to stay vigilant with new titles you add to your collection, being mindful of which ones have foreign dialog, and using the above steps to correct them as-needed.

Hope this guide helps out some fellow enthusiasts still having trouble with Forced Subs!

-Robert