I have an mkv file that i streamed to my roku 2 with no problem. It’s an English language film (VOBSUB) however halfway through one of the characters starts speaking Italian for 60 seconds. When i play this on the DVD (which the mkv was ripped from) it’s smart enough to temporarily enable English language subtitles for those 60 seconds, then they disappear.
Can I do the same with Plex? I know that if i manually enable subtitles they work but i don’t really want them on for the whole film just in case there is a short period of foreign dialogue.
Thanks for your reply. I don’t have access to that particular page but i am working it out slowly.
As VOB is apparently not supported I enabled the OpenSubtitles.org agent which gave me the option for “English - SRT External”
I then created a folder for the mkv and downloaded a version of the srt file with the following naming conventions
Mona Lisa Smile
Mona Lisa Smile (2003) - extended info.mkv
Mona Lisa Smile (2003) - extended info.eng.forced.srt
And i can now see an option “English - SRT External Forced”. However when i select this I just get subtitles through the whole film, when playing back through Chrome. This might be a stupid question but is the srt file I’m meant to download supposed to contain English subtitles for the entire film that only get ‘switched on’ for the relevant portion or is it just meant to contain subtitles just for the foreign language section?
The subtitle file must only contain the lines for the “foreign language” parts, otherwise it isn’t a ‘forced’ subtitle.
Unfortunately these are very rarely available for downloading.
When I am back at my computer, I’ll try copying the relevant parts of my linked thread in here.
Here follow the copies of posts Keep in mind that these were written as a response to another user’s questions.
The type of subtitles you seek is called ‘forced’ subtitles.
Post a Plex XML info of the jabba movie.
Then we can see if it contains subtitles.
If there are no subs in it, then you either
already missed to rip them in makemkv
they did not “survive” Handbrake
If you convert your movies to MP4 format, Handbrake has no choice than to either
burn the subtitles in (which is not what you want)
leave them out
This is because on DVD and BR subtitles are only stored in a ‘picture’ format. (VOBSUB or PGS)
But the MP4 container does not support either of these. It can only store text-based subtitles.
But Handbrake cannot convert ‘picture’ subtitles into ‘text’ subtitles.
So there is a dilemma.
Either you switch to the MKV container (it supports a whole lot of subtitle formats)
or you make sure to rip the forced subtitles and insert a third stage into your workflow where you convert these forced subs into SRT format.
You can use Subtitle Edit for instance.
Later you put your SRT file beside the movie.
Name the file exactly like the video file, but insert .forced before the file name extension.
e.g.
Movies /
Jabba the Hutt (2018) /
Jabba the Hutt (2018) - 1080p.mp4
Jabba the Hutt (2018) - 1080p.eng.forced.srt
(side note: there is no movie titled “jabba the hutt”. Are you referring to a tv show episode? If so, tv shows follow a different naming schema in Plex. Keep that in mind to prevent frustration.)
Ok, I kind of understand what is going on. So when I converted to mp4 I lost my subtitle because mp4s can’t handle picture subs. You say I need forced subtitles, but doesn’t that mean they are there for the entire movie? But mkv files are pretty large, that’s why I convert them to mp4.
The size is not a matter of file format. You can achieve the same size reduction if you choose mKV in Handbrake.
But that is just a side remark.
I recommend you to stay with using MP4 files and “sidecar” SRT subtitles.
Because even if you manage to rip & store the bitmap subtitles, it will present a challenge: not many Plex clients can handle them on their own. Most client will request that the Plex server burns them into the video picture = transcoding = CPU intensive on the server = video quality reduction = not desirable
I know I took the subs out of the movie when I ripped it because I didn’t think it would take away the special on-screen ones when Jabba was talking.
When you ripped the disc, you got MKV files, right?
Chances are that the forced subtitles were still in them, albeit in a ‘bitmapped’ format.
So if I only want to see the subs from when Jabba is talking, like how it is shown naturally on the Bluray, how do I do that? If I put forced subtitles, would that show subs the entire movie or just during this scene
It will show you the subtitle track that is ‘tagged’ as ‘forced’.
(There is actually nothing “forced” about forced subtitles. They are just named that way because they are activating without the user explicitly selecting them. Except in Plex you must set a preference to achieve that.)
If you are ripping your discs, make sure that the forced subs are ripped into a separate subtitle stream:
Download and install mediainfo, so you can quickly inspect your media files and see how many streams of which type are in them. This belongs into any toolbox. download mediainfo here
(pay attention during installation, it comes with a ‘piggybacked’ installer which asks to install additional crapware. Make sure to set/clear the right checkboxes!)
Download and install Subtitle Edit
it not only allows you to convert and edit subtitles but you can also use it to take a look at the bitmapped subtitles which are included in the freshly ripped MKV.
You can quickly deduce whether you have a ‘forced’ or a ‘normal’ or a ‘CC’ subtitle from the number of lines and whether there are other textual descriptions included.
Thanks very much for all that. Haven’t had time to digest it all but will go through it and should be able to sort it out. I think i need to look afresh at what is actually going on when i rip the mkv as i have just accepted the default options in the past.
Thanks again.
I have now fixed this, thanks again for your help. I took the full srt file (from OpenSubtitles) and used Subtitle Edit to hack it down so it only included the translation for the Italian segment i was interested in. After changing the timings to match and using the correct file naming convention it works fine.
The only confusion is that when i open the disc in MakeMKV i don’t actually see a ‘forced only’ subtitle option as displayed on your screenshot. It is just 2 ‘English’ options which are both VOB and no real use. So I am not sure how the DVD can achieve a forced effect if the forced subtitles don’t exist. I assume it is switching on the full English subtitles and then switching them off somehow.
This one was relatively easy as all the foreign language was in one small section of the movie, but It would be useful to get the real forced subtitles off each disc as otherwise it is potentially going to be very time consuming exercise for other films where there’s a large amount of forced subtitles throughout the whole film.
On DVD, the forced subs are usually embedded in the same stream as the ‘full’ subs.
There should be an extra checkbox in Subtitle Edit, which makes it extract and OCR only those lines which are marked as ‘forced’ from the full stream.
This check box will enable if the selected subtitle stream contains ‘forced’ lines:
@tarlander said:
The only confusion is that when i open the disc in MakeMKV i don’t actually see a ‘forced only’ subtitle option as displayed on your screenshot.
Then either the disc doesn’t contain forced subs or MakeMKV needs a little “nudge” in one of its config files:
seek and find the file default.mmcp.xml in the program folder of MakeMKV
edit it and change this pref like so: ignoreForcedSubtitlesFlag="false"
Try and see if it changes anything when you re-rip the disc again.
