[mythtv-users] Ubunto 18.04 / 0.29 export to mkv

[David Engel]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 03:50:49PM -0500, Peter Bennett wrote:
> On 12/17/18 3:06 PM, David Engel wrote:
> > Peter, have you ever tried and succeeded at getting all ATSC
> > subtitles/closed captioning copied during transcoding?  I have several
> > movies with English and Spanish subtitles that I want to preserve.
> > I've yet to find a way to do that with either handbrake or ffmpeg.  I
> > either get no subtitles or I get garbled, unintelligible subtitles.
> > 
> I don't have a problem with the subtitles. I only select one set of
> subtitles, but there is an option you can set to include multiple subtitles.
> I have never had them corrupted or lost, although I only look at the
> subtitles occasionally.

Peter, with some tips from Aman Gupta and a lot of trial and error, I
finally found a way to to this.  Those details are below(*).  The
problem now is the subtitles work fine on Linux but do not work at all
on Android.  This happens with both ffmpeg and mediacodec decoding on
Android.  The subtitle options to enable, disable and choose the
language are all there but the subtitles never show up on screen on
Android.  I can send you a test sample if you like.

(*)Ffmpeg corrupts a53 style captions when scte-20 data/captions are
also present.  Ffmpeg also can't pull captions from field 2.  Field 2
is where the Spanish captions are in my recordings.  Handbrake has
similar issues.  The solution is to dump the captions to .srt files
using ccextractor and then mux them with the transcoded video and
audio using ffmpeg or handbrake.

On a related note, I also confirmed with Aman that closed captions
don't work at all with mediacodec.  The interface has no way to pass
that information back.  Aman said there is a possible workaround but
it requires unofficial patches to ffmpeg to extract the appropriate
data and pass it back separately.

David
-- 
David Engel
david at istwok.net