Handbreak and Subtitle Question

Good evening. I’ve been having an issue with ripping my bluray’s lately. I want to add subtitles, but don’t want them burned into the movie. I want to be able to choose if they are on with Plex. I rip the discs with Make MKV and make sure that “forced only” is unchecked.

If I watch the MKV through VLC I can turn subtitles on and off (as a test to make sure I ripped it correctly). Next I take it into Handbreak to save and add all the Subtitle tracks that are on the MKV, and make sure all the boxes are NOT CHECKED. Needless to say when I play the movie the subtitles are burned in and when you look at the movie in Plex it says no subtitles. I even checked once again by playing the new movie with VLC and now the option for removing subtitles doesn’t work here either.

I think I narrowed it down to I have an incorrect setting in my Handbreak process that is causing this. Can anyone please help???

Thanks in advance

I just tried this with Handbrake 0.10.5 (the only version I’ll use until they fix custom anamorphic settings for DVDs).

I had an MKV file with an embedded UTF-8 sub track so I put it through Handbrake, making the very same settings you did - adding a sub track, but checking nothing. I made two test files - an MKV and an MP4 and loaded them into a movies library for a look-see.

The MP4 file shows a sub track that can be enabled. English-MOV_TXT
The MKV file shows a sub track that can be enabled. English - ASS

Played both files, enabled subs, they play fine, but both transcode.

Stripped those same subs out of the original file with MKVToolNix (MKVExtract - in the MKVToolNIx folder), added as sidecar srt subs - both can be selected and both Direct Play.

The thing that could be different is the format of the subs you have ripped from MakeMKV. I do the same thing you’re doing, but I only need a forced track so when I’m running it through handbrake before adding it to the library I burn in those forced PGS subs so I don’t have to worry about transcoding later.

Right now, it’s a bit of a mystery, but that’s all I got.

Thanks for the help

Have you resolved your issue?