Determining forced subtitles (PGS) for Handbrake MKV conversion

[ppwaskie]

I've been scouring the web and these forums for a better solution than what I'm doing, and I've been drawing a blank for a few weeks.

What I have: I rip my Blu Ray discs with DVDFab no problem, full BD50 rip. I have the full disc structure available, and I can easily encode things with Handbrake to my desired format, with my presets I've tuned over time.

What I want: I am going back through my library and am starting to add subtitles to my encodes. Mainly I'm re-encoding my whole library, which is fine. I'd like to include the main English subtitle (for my folks who like subtitles in a movie), but mostly I'm after including the "forced" subtitles.

What I currently do: I use eac3to in full -demux mode to tell me which subtitle streams have forced subtitles in them. If the "main" English subtitle track (usually the first one) has forced, then I select that to burn in forced-only in Handbrake.

Why this sucks: I don't want to have to demux the entire audio, video, and subtitle tracks with eac3to for it to tell me which PGS tracks have forced subtitles. Once the demux is complete, then the subtitle tracks are closed by the application, and renamed to have that information of forced or not in their names. It works, but it adds a huge amount of time to pull the h264 stream and the DTS/AC3 streams, when all I do is dump them afterwards. There has to be a better way...

What I'm looking for: does anyone have or know of a way to analyze a full disc structure from a Blu Ray and report which PGS subtitle tracks have forced subtitles? Like I said, my current method works, but 45 minutes or so to rip a disc, 30 minutes to demux it, then another 15 to transfer it to my encoding rigs, I'd really like to drop that 30 minute demux step if possible.

[hello_hello]

If eac3to writes the info regarding forced subtitles to the log file you could probably check it for forced subtitles without extracting anything. I just opened an MKV with the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Stream Extractor and the eac3to log file contained this without me needing to extract anything. Hopefully it'd do the same with Bluray discs.
I'm not really sure as I don't work with subtitles a lot and generally I'd rip with the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Stream Extractor anyway (AbyDVD running in the background), so I'd rip any English subs in the process and worry about it later.

MKV, 1 video track, 1 audio track, 2 subtitle tracks, 1:44:17, 24p /1.001
1: h264/AVC, English, 1920x1040 24p /1.001 (24:13)
2: AC3, English, 5.1 channels, 640kbps, 48kHz
3: Subtitle (ASS), English
4: Subtitle (ASS), English, "forced subtitles"