Intermittant Subtitle Integration

[follz20]

Hi all

I am apologizing in advance if this question has been covered already and I missed it, but I promise I read through the sticky's and several pages in this sub-forum and had no luck finding a solution to my question. So hopefully this won't become another redundant thread.

Basically, there are a few movies (DVD & Blu-Ray rips) that I would like to have intermittent subtitles in the scenes where a different language is spoken. That is to say, I would like it to be HARD-CODED but NOT throughout the entire movie. Sometimes I am lucky, and subtitles are hard-coded to the video itself and there is no need to fiddle with subtitles. Unfortunately, as most of you know, this usually isn't the case and there will entire scenes where a foreign language is spoken and I will have no idea what is going on because my process usually goes RIP>Encode>Play (my folly, I know).

I am not completely ignorant with subs, I know about hard/soft coding which are easy enough, but I just need to know about intermittent hard-coding foreign language scenes ONLY. Is this possible? Would one method be *simply* editing the entire sub file and deleting everything BAR those foreign language scenes? Would that work how I think it would, or would it fail? Would this be the ONLY method where it would work?

Most DVDs that I have seen only have the entire sub files and not just for individual scenes etc. which makes things more difficult.

Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope I might get some info from people more knowledgeable/smarter than myself.

Cheers

[guns1inger]

Usually, in these cases, there will be multiple subtitle tracks. For example, an English language film with some non-English dialogue may have a forced sub-title track that only contains subs for the non-English dialogue, and a separate subtitle track that contains all the dialogue, regardless of the spoken language. You just have to work out which is the forced subtitle track. You may be able to work this out through the preview function in your ripper, or you may have to rip the whole thing and take a look with PGCEdit to see which subtitle track you need to keep. Any movie I have seen that has some non-English dialogue that is meant to have subs (and not all films provide subs for non-English dialogue) either hard code these sections, or provide a specific track for them. I have yet to see a movie with partial non-English dialogue that requires you to have subs on the whole time.

[AlanHK]

Would one method be *simply* editing the entire sub file and deleting everything BAR those foreign language scenes? Would that work how I think it would, or would it fail?

That works, I've done it.

I copied the complete subtitle file (SRT) and deleted all except those parts translating non-English dialogue.
I set that one as the default subtitle, with the complete one as an alternate.

I did most of the editing in a text editor, then loaded it in Subtitle Workshop to fix up the numbering.

[lowellriggsiam]

Do a search for "forced subtitles" a situation is similar to what you are asking about like on the Star Wars movies where the aliens are speaking in one language the subtitles appear by default.

[follz20]

Cheers for the help fellas. It is very much appreciated.