2012 forced subtitles not recognized

[nickf77]

I know this topic has been addressed in the past, but it seems it's never truly been resolved. I've run in to some considerable frustration trying to rip my DVD copy of the movie 2012, keeping just the forced subtitles (there's a good amount of Chinese conversation in the movie). The DVD contains 5 subtitle tracks (English, French, French, English, English), the first English track being the normal subtitles, the second English track being visually impaired subtitles, and the third director's commentary.

However, "Display only forced subpicture" in DVDFab on the first track fails to distinguish the forced subs from the normal ones and renders every single English subtitle. DVDSubEdit also reads all subtitles as forced. The forced subtitles display fine on DVD players, however, so there's obviously forced flags in there somewhere. I've heard things about Sony Pictures using unconventional practices for subtitle integration, but I'm not sure.

Has anyone managed to successfully rip 2012 WITH the forced subs?

[AlanHK]

http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/4103254/2012-en

[jman98]

Sony does a lot of weird stuff with their DVDs to make it difficult for consumers to copy them. Note that the "forced" flag is treated as being sort of optional to comply with in reality. While most standalone DVD players comply with it, I've heard of software players that did not and simply did not display forced subs.

It's been a while since I've used DVDFab as I'm hardly an expert, but are you unable to simply specify to rip ONLY the "normal English subititles"? I assume that these are the forced subs. You could rip everything and then use DVD Shrink to create a new DVD without the other subs. It is possible to use IFOEdit to specify that certain subs are forced in an authored DVD, but you'll have to search online for how to do that.

You're not being clear about what you are doing that is giving you problems. Are you trying to play the rip on a PC but the forced subs aren't there? Or is that happening on some standalone playback device? Your post sort of implies that you're getting too many subs, but honestly I don't have any idea what the heck you are trying to do here. It's up to you to provide enough details to get help on exactly what the problem is.

[nickf77]

You're not being clear about what you are doing that is giving you problems. Are you trying to play the rip on a PC but the forced subs aren't there? Or is that happening on some standalone playback device? Your post sort of implies that you're getting too many subs, but honestly I don't have any idea what the heck you are trying to do here. It's up to you to provide enough details to get help on exactly what the problem is.

Sorry, I guess it made sense in my head but not on paper. I'm trying to rip the movie only (no menus) to an AVI and I only want subtitles to appear during foreign speaking scenes. Using DVDFab, when I rip the movie I select the first subtitle track as the one to include in the rip and check the "Display only forced subpicture" box. For the rest of my movie collection, that worked for displaying forced subs correctly. For 2012, all of the English subs are included in the rip, not just the forced subs.

No error messages, just that the final .avi movie includes subtitles for all speech throughout the movie, which I don't want.

[jman98]

Do I what I said in the 2nd paragraph. Rip everything using DVDFab. Use DVDShrink to create a new DVD with only the forced subs. Then use that new DVD as the basis for your encode. It's ugly to do it that way, but it should work. Well, I am assuming that the forced subs are actually a separate subtitle stream, which would make only them selectable. That's how I've normally seen it done.

Sony may have deliberately made the forced subs hard to find to thwart people like you. Seriously. Or the DVD may be authored incompetently and it's just a mistake that is causing you so many problems here.

[nickf77]

The forced subs are definitely in the first stream - the one with all the other English subs. I've been able to open the decrypted VOB's with DVDSubEdit and from there I can pick the first subtitle track and check 'Only show forced subpics'. I can even save just those forced subs to a .SUP perfectly fine. So now I have a ripped copy of 2012 (.MKV - I found that mkv's are a lot easier to work with) with no subtitles a .SUP with only the forced subtitles and a .SUB/.IDX (converted from SUP with SubtitleCreator). Now how do I combine the external subtitle track, either SUP or IDX/SUB whichever is easier, with the raw MKV?

[jman98]

MKVtoolnix should be able to do it.