Im trying to make a DVD of a TV series with AVStoDVD.
I have an mkv video and the video has embedded subtitles. When played in VLC media player only the non-english parts are played. I guess these parts are 'flagged' in the mkv for forced playback.
My problem is, when I add the subtitles in AVStoDVD to make a DVD it shows all of the subtitles, not just the flagged ones. I'm assuming AVStoDVD just doesnt support this flagged function.
Is there any easy way to get around this? I know how to extract the subtitles with MKVExtractGUI, but it extracts the whole subtitles... I just want the flagged non-english parts.
Is there any other program that can extract just the flagged subtitles so I can add them to AVStoDVD, or is there any way to just find out what parts are flagged without watching it in VLC so I can delete the rest of the subtitle lines?
Are you 100% sure the non-English subtitles aren't also hard-coded as part of the video?
It's not uncommon to find an MKV which has hard-coded subtitles for the non-English parts and a separate subtitle stream which contains everything.
I could be wrong, but I don't think there's a way to "flag" parts of a single subtitle stream in an MKV as forced. Usually at best there's two streams, one with all the subtitles, and another with only the forced subtitles. An MKV can include default and forced subtitle streams, but I think most players just ignore the setting anyway and you have to select the subtitles you want manually.
I guess of you disable any subtitles in VLC, or to be 100% sure, resave the MKV using MKVMergeGUI without the subtitle stream.... if you then play the newly save MKV with VLC and there's still subtitles for the non-English parts, you'll know they're encoded as part of the video.
Are the subs in the MKV file VOB/IDX?
If they are, demux the subs then use the SubResync utility (part of VobSub) to load them.
In the right column (Forced), any subs that are 'Yes' can be selected and saved out as a new sub/idx file that can be loaded into Avs2DVD.
I created and burned the dvd without adding any subtitles and those parts that were non-english had no subtitles in the video.
If I add the subtitles, then ALL of the dialogue (english and non-english) have subtitles.
If I knew before I could have just watched all the episodes in VLC, then made note of where subtitles were needed.. but I didnt know and watched the DVD I made instead. That's the only way I can figure this out, but I dont want to have to watch the videos twice: once in VLC then once on DVD to verify there are no glitches from encoding. I was hoping for an easier way.
EDIT:
Where can I find subresync? [I found it, just needed to install the VobSub]
Sorry, and demux just means I need to extract the subs from the MKV, then use subresync, right?
EDIT:
The subtitles are .srt
when I open them in subresync nothing happens.
It should be able to open a valid .srt file - but .srt files contain no flags, so it doesn't help - Notepad should open them too, if you want to verify that the demuxing worked.
If the subs were in fact burned in on the original mkv, (part of the video) they would show up in the DVD.
Are you absolutely sure there's not two srt subtitle streams? I don't use MKVExtractGUI, but MKVCleaver instead, so I don't know what MKVExtractGUI can and can't do. Using MKVCleaver however, it should show all the streams included in the MKV file and if there's more than one srt subtitle stream, you should be able to extract one or both of them.
Unless there's actually two srt subtitle streams what you're saying doesn't quite make sense, because to the best of my knowledge there's no way to flag parts of a srt subtitle stream as forced. It's either all or nothing.
Originally posted by hello_hello: Are you absolutely sure there's not two srt subtitle streams? I don't use MKVExtractGUI, but MKVCleaver instead, so I don't know what MKVExtractGUI can and can't do. Using MKVCleaver however, it should show all the streams included in the MKV file and if there's more than one srt subtitle stream, you should be able to extract one or both of them.
Unless there's actually two srt subtitle streams what you're saying doesn't quite make sense, because to the best of my knowledge there's no way to flag parts of a srt subtitle stream as forced. It's either all or nothing.
MKVCleaver worked.
With all the other programs I extracted each subtitle streams and none of them were right.
When MKVCleaver extracted them one was only the non-english dialogue! :) I dont know what the problem was before. After it not extracting any separate subtitle I guess I just assumed thats how it must work with the 'flags'. In the comments of the file it said "English FORCED FLAG subtitle track" The flag part threw me off, if it just said forced subtitles then I probably would have figured out right away that it was a problem with the programs.
Sorry for wasting your time everyone. Thanks for the help. I'll be using MKVCleaver from now on.
Thinking about it, there was a bit of bother a while back with MKVCleaver not working properly after MKVToolNix had been updated. Something to do with a change in the way MKVToolNix identified the individual streams.... I can't remember the exact details.
The same might apply to other tools such as MKVMergeGUI (I don't really know) but it might pay to make sure you have the latest version of each program installed. If you have the latest MKVCleaver and MKVToolNix, I know they'll at least play well together.
Just in case you downloaded MKVCleaver 0.5.0.3 (not sure where you would have downloaded it from) there's a version 0.5.0.4 update patch. I think it's just a patch. The older version needs to be installed first. VideoHelp only updated their page to include the patch today, even though it's been out for a few months. http://www.videohelp.com/tools/MKVcleaver For some reason AfterDawn doesn't host it.
