Forced vs Unforced Subtitles

[Muttley.Drat]

I'm a bit unsure of this myself.
I recently 'COPIED' a film that had certain hairy, tail-less primates who were asserting their dominance over other less-hairy, tail-less primates at the start of a new day ! (Get it ???)
Anyway, the film had some Apes talking amongst themselves (needing subtitles) and also had Humans (more apes) talking amongst themselves (not needing subs).
You'd expect that as the film had 2 lots of subs that the second subs were for the hard of hearing (correct in this case). Regardless I have Ripped the film 4 times (with both subs, and with 'forced' and 'all subs' for each). I have ended up with no subs for 2 of these and full subs for both of these too, nothing between.
Why is this not working ?
Presumably the text for the subs is present in the VOB stream (or is this an additional video layer (very small file size difference, so can't see that (and how would forced work in that instance ?)), can we not select from either "COPY" or "RIPPER" to save (not Main Movie or "To AVI" respectively but ....) to "save to .srt" or similar ? for subsequent manipulation ?
How do 'YOU' extract subs for manipulation within 'Subtitle Edit' ?

Mutt

[Muttley.Drat]

I also agree about 'normal and forced' should be the default, but if they do 'profiles' (see future developments) than that would be handled by default anyway

Mutt

[rmeyers]

That movie worked for me on blu-ray.

As for Subtitle Edit, you click File and then Import Subtitle from MKV file. It will scan your mkv and you can select which stream. Then you can convert from pictures to text via OCR and output as a .SRT file.

I like to have the original VOB (DVD) or PGS (BD) subtitles.

[Muttley.Drat]

RMeyers,
I only have the title on DVD
I'd prefer not to have to rip a title twice (my files usually end up as AVI's though have used mkv's renamed to avi (doesn't always work but the avi wrapper is flexible)
I'll give SE a spin and see what happens

Mutt

[signals]

Here is the breakdown of the subs on the Apes DVD, Region 1/US version:

• Stream 1
  • EE full dialogue no forced subs
• Stream 2
  • ES full dialogue no forced subs
• Stream 3
  • EE Ape-spoken dialogue only, forced start
• Stream 4
  • ES Ape-spoken dialogue only, forced start
• Stream 5
  • FR Ape-spoken dialogue only, forced start

So for English output, choose Stream 3 ONLY, you can choose Display only forced or not, it does not matter. Note that there is no French full dialogue stream included. Also, when ripping to MP4 with v9.1.8.8, only the first two forced subtitles ("Caesar....they are close") are rendered into the video, the rest are missing whether Display Only Forced is selected or not and regardless of CPU or GPU decoding/encoding. DVDSubEdit shows that all subs are present in the source. I have reported it to the QA Team.

[CodeMonkey]

signals, how did you work out that streams 3-5 were "forced start"?
I mean was that some info you got from DVDFab or did you use some other app?

I think the amount of subtitle info that DVDFab provides could be much improved and i would like it to have an option to just rip the subtitles without the video.

What i did when i ripped the ape movie mentioned previously was to copy it to disc first, then i used eac3to extract the sup files (streams 1 & 3 from signals list), which i then loaded into SubEdit and converted to srt format. I then added the forced srt file as an external subtitle to DVDFab when converting the movie to mkv format and used the option to render direct to video. I then edited the srt from stream 1 and removed the forced subtitles (otherwise i end up seeing duplicate subs on screen for those that are forced). This whole process is a bit of a chore but if DVDFab had more features for subtitles it could be a whole lot easier.

The reason i use the above approach is because i find the results work well with my openelec media center running on a raspberry pi. I'm not bothered about seeing the subtitles as originally rendered in sup/sub form so srt is fine.

[signals]

In this case I used DVDSubEdit because I needed the extra detail and it works with streams within the VOB files, so no other steps were needed. The Preview window in DVDFab can give you a pretty good clue if you just need to know which stream/setting to use in Ripper.

[Muttley.Drat]

Signals,
The title I have is Region 2 and it ONLY has two sub title streams.
Thanks for reporting it to the team, I'll keep a ripped folder on my PC awaiting a fix. In the mean time I have a full sub-titled "Dawn if the Planet of the Apes" which is a bit irritating.

CodeMonkey,
Wow ! that seems like a real pain in the proverbial, how long does that take ? (i.e. how much time could you be saved if the right tools were put in place) ;-)

Cheers
Mutt

[signals]

Mutt
DVDSubEdit will let you take any sub stream (on a DVD) and make any of the individual subs in it forced start, so you can take a stream that has regular dialogue and translated dialogue subs and make only the translation subs forced. It really does not take long, you just click through all the subs and change the start command as shown in the capture, then save it. Hopefully DVDFab will have something similar in a future version.

[CodeMonkey]

CodeMonkey,
Wow ! that seems like a real pain in the proverbial, how long does that take ? (i.e. how much time could you be saved if the right tools were put in place) ;-)

i've never really timed it from start to finish but it typically depends on the quality of the original subtitle images as they have to be OCR'd to convert from sub/sup to srt and any forced subs just makes it take even longer. I find that SubExtractor generally ends up with better results but takes longer because it tends to prompt for more characters that its not sure of, whereas SubEdit does more on its own but gets more wrong so you end up having to do more fix-up afterwards. The main problem is that SubExtractor only handles idx/sub files and wont do bluray subs unless they are generated through DVDFab first - thats why an option to just rip the subs in DVDFab would be very useful.

Although i've been using DVDFab since 2006 it was mainly for creating DVD copies for the kids to ruin rather than giving them the originals. Since i've recently built a large 8-disk custom NAS box i've been starting to rip my movie collection to video files but as i've only been doing it for a while i'm still learning as i go. One mistake i made was going for avi output instead of mkv which means having to do some titles again. MKV allows me to preserver chapters which are lost with AVI. The new NAS box is also doubling as a vmware server and it has the raw CPU power to encode the movies much faster than my main PC, for example my main PC took about 10 hours to encode one movie and the VM image on the NAS box did it in about 1.5 hours.

There may already be other tools out there than will make the job easier, but so far i havent found them. but i havent exactly been looking for them either. Happy to hear any recommendations though.

[Muttley.Drat]

CodeMonkey,
You've got me worried now, I mainly rip to AVI for use on my NAS
I agree about kids and optical media, I think it's a consequence of never having to deal with vinyl discs (i.e. records)

Signals,
I'm not sure I want to spend all that much time (and effort) to get forced sub titles.
It's something that my cheap (£18 ~ $25) travel DVD player does with ease let alone my main Blu-Ray.
I have just gone back to Season 2 of Grimm, there is a lot of Spanish, German and some French dialogue (intermixed with all the main English dialogue) but NONE of it comes through to the ripped version (Main Sub - Forced)
Are you saying that there is a 'new' kind of forced sub-title that DVDFab can't work with ? (even though my 12 year old cheap DVD player can ?)
Is there any explanation as to why this just doesn't work, has this always been the case or has nobody noticed ?

Mutt

[signals]

No it has certainly not always been the case, I am not sure of the problem but it seems to be only when direct render to video is selected (remux into file works normally but not all playback devices support it). The developers are checking it. My suggestion with DVDSubEdit was just a temporary workaround.

[Muttley.Drat]

Signals,
The temp workaround understood and appreciated. (as is, your time and effort).
I also understand that it 'could' be seen that admitting faults/issues with the DVDFab product could be seen as a negative.
But I disagree, ALL of the people on this forum prove that they are part of a community trying to make the BEST POSSIBLE product out there.
We are also committed to supporting you in doing it, hence people buying 'lifetime' licences. So I would suggest that it would be an excellent idea to have a list of 'known bugs' that are in the process of being fixed.
And from this visibility we'd have an understanding of the 'whirring' of the machine parts going on in the background. But I wish them (the DVDFab code monkeys ) well in their efforts and praise for their accomplishments
Cheers

Mutt