Databases of mandatory subtitles

[NeBlackCat]

By mandatory subtitles I mean the ones you have to have switched on to understand any non-English (or non-human!) dialogue in an English movie (even if you have normal subtitles switched off).

When backing up a DVD (eg. into an AVI with AutoGK) it's a pain to figure out how to get these added, or even if the movie uses any. Sometimes they're stored in the DVD as forced subtitles, sometimes they aren't, sometimes they're the first English subtitle stream listed, sometimes they aren't, mostly the movie doesn't have any, etc, etc.

I'm always backing up movies then finding there's a bit of non-English dialogue 2 hours into it that I didn't know about and/or didn't get the subtitles for.

It occured to me that there must be a database somewhere which tells you how the mandatory subtitles are stored for a particular DVD/movie, so you can set (say) AutoGK properly without lots of manual investigation and/or trial and error.

But I'm damned if I can find one. The main subtitle sites around don't even provide this info.

Anyone know of any, or have any other creative solutions on how to better handle this problem when backing up movies to AVI?

Ta for any input!!

[Baldrick]

No such database. Good review sites lists subtitles information and you can search for reviews on http://www.dvd-basen.dk/uk/home.php3

[AlanHK]

Just extract all the subtitle streams. If there are "mandatory" subtitles, they're bound to be much smaller than the complete ones.

And/or you can look at the VOBs and work it out pretty quickly with DVDSubedit.

[manono]

The "mandatory" subs could be smaller, if they have their own substream. If they're forced subs, they'll be part of a larger stream which also contains the main dialog. It can be a problem figuring out where these subs are, but I agree that if you know what you're doing, it's a simple procedure. I prefer to get the IDX/SUB file and open the various streams in SubResynch, and look either for the marked forced subs or, as you say, a stream much smaller than the others.

You can't do this easily in AutoGK, because you have to extract one stream at a time and run the Preview. You have to know in advance that there are these subs on the DVD (not always easily known), and you then have to extract and examine the subs outside of AutoGK.