Inadvertent softsubs despite burning-in only hardsubs

[dgoswald]

Hi,

I've been ripping my Blu-ray collection in recent months and I've been successful in getting quality encodes using MeGUI (which I personally think is an absolutely brilliant bit of software). I've reached the dreaded 'foreign subtitled' films, i.e. those films which are predominantly English language but have the odd line of dialogue in a foreign tongue.

The first film I attempted was Braveheart and after a weekend of thorough research and trial and error, I finally managed to get hardsubs burned into the picture (BTW, I prefer hardsubs because I'm kinda future-proofing my rips. I know some hardware is rather temperamental when it comes to showing softsubs, and just for my peace of mind - and because I don't want to re-rip my Blu-ray when I upgrade my home theatre hardware in the future - I prefer burnt-in subs).

I managed to get the hardsubs into the film using an .ass file as well as the VSfilter.dll, which is all good of course. I carried out around 5 or so test encodes of a scene in Braveheart where William Wallace speaks French, and everything seemed to be in order. I tried playing the test scene on my home theatre equipment (an LG Blu-ray / general Home Theatre system) and to my delight the hardcoded subs appeared as they should. So I decided to go ahead and encode the whole movie.

To my surprise, when I played back the encoded rip for the first time I noticed that, somehow, the burnt-in foreign subs had also been softsubbed! Obviously it's not the end of the world, but what's going on? I did everything I was meant to in order to get the hardsubs sorted, and I'm quite mystified how I've managed to get the soft subs included too. Thankfully, I can turn off the soft subs

Here's images of what I'm referring to. The top picture is of the hard and soft subs simultaneously appearing, whilst the second picture is of the hard subs only and soft subs turned off.





As I said, it's not the end of the world as I can turn off the soft subs as evidenced by the second picture, but for my own peace of mind can anyone advise on how to prevent the first situation in the future?

Thanks in advance.

[Baldrick]

Can't you select the subtitle streams you want to keep in megui? Or maybe it's magically adding all subs to the mkv....

[dgoswald]

Hey there, thanks for replying.

I didn't have any of the PGS subtitles selected in MeGUI (I just checked again to make sure). Instead I selected the relevant .ass subtitle file in the Subtitle tab in MeGUI and entered the necessary stuff in the avisynth script. It's a mystery, that's for sure, hehe.

[dgoswald]

It's sorted! After further trial and error I ran the full MKV through MkvExtract, selected the video and audio streams leaving the .ass subtitles unselected. I muxed both streams with an .SRT files for soft subs, and now the hardsubs appear as they should during the foreign bits and I have the option to turn on or off the soft subs. Very happy