How to make a subtitle track forced

General Discussions
1

I ripped my blu-ray of Thor The Dark World and I’m having trouble with the small section of alien language subtitles that I forgot to include when I ripped and encoded. I grabbed a copy of the subtitle srt and used Xmedia Recode to remux the track into the mkv. This worked, but the subtitles don’t appear automatically - I have to manually select the track. Is there a way I can force them to be on? I’ve tried just about every setting I can think of in the subtitle section of XMedia Recode (convert, render, copy) and I have set the “forced subtitle” section to both yes and no. So far nothing I’ve tried has worked. I know I could re-encode the video and burn them in, but I feel like this should be possible without having to do that.

Any help would be appreciated!

2

you can use MKVToolnix…

  • open the file in their GUI (header editor).
  • Pick the subtitle track to be forced
  • Select the track‘s forced property and set it to true/yes
  • Save the file
  • Done

This will result in all the subtitles in that file to be forced!

3

@roblanderson said:
I grabbed a copy of the subtitle srt and used Xmedia Recode to remux the track into the mkv.

Or even easier:
If you already have a SRT file with all the ‘alien’ dialogue, name it exactly like the video file,
but instead of the .mkv file name extension you add .eng.forced.srt
Then you put this renamed srt file beside the video file (not into a subfolder).

It is recommended to have a subfolder per movie
e.g.

Thor The Dark World / 
   Thor The Dark World - 1080p.mkv
   Thor The Dark World - 1080p.eng.forced.srt