[mythtv-users] Forced subtitles in mkv DVD rips.

[Alexander Fisher]

On 29 May 2012 22:22, Jim Stichnoth <stichnot at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 7:47 AM, Alexander Fisher <alex at alexfisher.me.uk> wrote:
>> On 23 May 2012 17:14, Jim Stichnoth <stichnot at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 4:50 PM, Alexander Fisher <alex at alexfisher.me.uk> wrote:
>>>> On 17 May 2012 17:13, Jim Stichnoth <stichnot at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Alexander Fisher <alex at alexfisher.me.uk> wrote:
>>>>>> Either way, I still haven't been able to get my rip of 'The Mummy' to
>>>>>> automatically display the forced subtitle track.  I've tried using
>>>>>> mkvpropedit to flag the relevant track as default as well as forced.
>>>>>> I've also tried including the main english subtitle track as well as
>>>>>> the forced track.  Nothing's worked.  Myth is definitely spotting the
>>>>>> fact that the track is marked as forced (in the OSD it displays
>>>>>> 'forced' in brackets), but it still won't display it without me
>>>>>> manually enabling it.  *If* I was willing to transcode my dvds, I
>>>>>> believe software is available that will hard code subtitle tracks into
>>>>>> the video stream, but this isn't a quality sacrifice I'm willing to
>>>>>> make.
>>>>>
>>>>> If you can open a ticket and include a pointer to a problematic
>>>>> sample, I will take a look.
>>>>
>>>> http://code.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/10735
>>>
>>> It turns out that an entire subtitle track can be marked as forced, or
>>> an individual subtitle in the stream can be marked as forced.  MythTV
>>> was only honoring the forced flag on individual subtitles, though it
>>> was making use of the track-level flag for OSD information.  I don't
>>> know much about MKV versus DVD, but it seems that some (all?) MKV
>>> workflows are just setting the track-level flag.
>>>
>>> I just pushed a fix to Master that makes Alex's sample work correctly.
>>>  If that holds up, I'll push it to 0.25-fixes in a few days.
>>
>> Thanks for this Jim.  It works great.i
>> I'm still trying to come up with a both quick and fool proof way of
>> identifying which DVD ISO subtitle tracks are forced tracks and which
>> are just normal subtitle tracks.
>> If I'm understanding this correctly, you're saying that there's also a
>> third 'type'.  An otherwise normal subtitle track with select
>> individual subtitles marked as forced?
>
> Sort of.  There are "normal" subtitle tracks and "forced" subtitle
> tracks, each of which consists of a stream of individual subtitles.
> In addition, any given subtitle in the stream can be marked as forced.
>  At least, that is how it is structured in the ffmpeg code which we
> use to decode the structure.  In the sample you provided, the
> individual subtitles were not marked as forced even though the track
> was marked as forced.  It's possible that this is explicitly allowed
> in the DVD and/or MKV specs, and it's also possible that ffmpeg was
> supposed to mark individual subtitles as forced but neglected to.
>
>> On a related note, if I had chosen to not go down the mkv route, would
>> myth have automatically displayed the forced subtitles if I had played
>> the ripped ISO?
>
> Most likely.  But, it's still nice to have MythTV do the right thing
> for mkv files.
>

Hi Jim

Having played around a bit more, I'm not sure mythtv is still always
doing the right thing for mkvs.
I've got a mkv with four subtitle streams including one marked as
forced.  These don't get automatically played.
Does mythtv look through all the subtitle streams to find forced
subtitles, or does it only look at the first one?

Thanks,
Alex