Subtitles

[Drerunsit]

I just noticed when watching my backup of Avatar that the language of the Pandora natives does not have accompanying English subtitles. Up to this point, I have not included any subtitles in BDRB when doing a movie-only backup. I was under the impression that the term "subtitles" referred to the actual spoken languages, such as English. How do I distinguish between the two when configuring BDRB? In other words, I don't want any subtitles for the movie itself, unless it is intended for translation purposes in the film; Avatar is a good example.

[Nelson37]

Those are usually called "forced subtitles".

[Drerunsit]

Well, I thought those would be distinguished in the list of subtitles but I guess they're not. The strange thing is that my backups of "Robin Hood" and "Iron Man 2" show the forced subs even though I used the same options to create those as I did Avatar (no subs selected).

[johns0]

Sometimes movies have burned in subs so you see the translated language without selectable subs.

[Drerunsit]

Is there any way to distinguish which movies will require selection of subs? If so, how do you select only the forced subs for movie-only backup?

[manono]

No way to tell in advance. Sometimes the translation for the foreign language is 'burned' or 'embedded' into the video, as johns0 mentioned. Sometimes they have their own separate track, and sometimes they're marked 'forced' within the larger track that has all the dialog. You just have to check the various subtitle tracks until you find them. I haven't worked with the Avatar Blu-Ray so I can't help there. Maybe someone else can.

[fritzi93]

Don't have that movie, but IIRC, the forced subs were in a weird font (papyrus?).

Anyway, forced subs in Blu-Ray are *usually* embedded in an extra subtitle track. The only way to be certain you'll retain them in a full disc backup is to keep all English tracks, and they don't take up very much space. But you can usually identify and extract forced subs with BDSup2Sub. Then you can remux them if doing a movie-only backup. BTW, with BDRB, you can click on a sub stream and turn it on, i.e. automatically display. No real need to hardcode them.

[Drerunsit]

BTW, with BDRB, you can click on a sub stream and turn it on, i.e. automatically display. No real need to hardcode them.

Not sure what you mean here.

[fritzi93]

Sorry, that was not really germane to the topic. But to explain: Occasionally, I'll set a subtitle stream to automatically display, i.e. default ON, rather than OFF. Usually a documentary. In BDRB, double-click the stream to see your options. The point being, so long as you keep the video in BD/AVCHD, no need for hardcoded subs.

Anyway, try keeping *all* the English subs and see if that does the trick. If memory serves, there were several threads about folks having difficulties of one kind or another with Avatar. Some were about decryption, some about the forced subs. You could try a search.

[Drerunsit]

Ok, I used tsMuxer to pull out the English subtitle track and used BDSup2Sub to remove everything but the forced subs from that track. I then saved it as a .sup. How do I get that new track to show up in BDRB when I create my movie-only backup?

*EDIT*

Just for clarification, I want to take the new .sup file and make it hard-coded into the movie (the BDMV structure that I extracted to my HDD with AnyDVD HD). Then I want to be able to use BDRB to create a BD25 backup as I have been doing.

[fritzi93]

Remux it into the main movie with tsMuxer, using "Add". Then re-encode with BDRB. Should work okay (so long as the force flag was preserved) but no guarantees. Or simply turn it to default "On" with BDRB. I don't have that one to test and lots of people reported having trouble with Avatar's forced subs.

I should think keeping all English subs would be fairly certain to work and subtitle streams don't take much space. IIRC, the author of BDRB (jdobbs) recommends doing it that way to preserve forced subs.

Anyway, just to repeat the distinction, forced subs are not the same as hardcoded subs. For your purposes, it's not necessary, but it can be done with, for instance, HDConvertToX, among others.

[Drerunsit]

Remux it into the main movie with tsMuxer, using "Add". Then re-encode with BDRB. Should work okay (so long as the force flag was preserved) but no guarantees. Or simply turn it to default "On" with BDRB. I don't have that one to test and lots of people reported having trouble with Avatar's forced subs.

I should think keeping all English subs would be fairly certain to work and subtitle streams don't take much space. IIRC, the author of BDRB (jdobbs) recommends doing it that way to preserve forced subs.

Anyway, just to repeat the distinction, forced subs are not the same as hardcoded subs. For your purposes, it's not necessary, but it can be done with, for instance, HDConvertToX, among others.

Ok. I remuxed the sub track back in and checked the new m2ts. The subtitles appear, but the last set of a dialogue scene stays on screen too long... approximately 10 seconds or slightly longer. Not sure how to correct this.

[fritzi93]

Load the extracted forced subtitle track again into BDSup2Sub. Select the subtitle number, top left, read it to verify it's the one you want. Select "Edit" -> "Edit Frame" and a window will appear. Here you can change the start/end times for displaying that particular sub. Change (shorten) the end time by however many seconds you judge necessary. Save changes and export a new subtitle track (as *.sup, of course, no resolution conversion, but you figured that out already).

Try again and good luck.

[EDIT] No good explanation for why the display times are incorrect. Maybe a fault in BDSup2Sub, or perhaps something not quite right with the original disc structure. It wouldn't be the first time, and mind you that disc got the full anti-copy protection treatment for making it hard to deal with. It took AnyDVDHD and DVDFab a couple version changes to completely remove the protection. I lean to that explanation, but don't really know.

[Drerunsit]

I tried again and it seems that the Na'vi subtitles are working correctly now. My only other concern is this: When I remuxed the forced-only .sup into the original m2ts, I also removed all of the other language subtitles. However, when I fired up the BD structure in BDRB, all 4 original subtitle streams appear on the list in the main screen, instead of just the single one that is actually in the m2ts (the Na'vi track):



I changed the source path and then changed it back just to make sure it wasn't a residual reading of the old m2ts, but no change. Even so, I "turned ON" the English stream. I'm hoping this will get the results I want. Also, is there a way to make a modified .sup track visible in BDRB after I remux it into the m2ts? I tried that before and still only got the original languages on the list in BDRB. I even tried to set the new track language to "undetermined" to see if that would do the trick, but it still didn't show. In this case, if my method works, I will still only have a single subtitle track (the Na'vi language); however, for future movies with this issue (such as 2012) I am going to want both a "turned ON" custom track comprised of forced subs WITHOUT English spoken subs AND the option to turn on full spoken English subs. Again, I can't do that if I can't see custom sub tracks in BDRB. Any ideas?

[fritzi93]

Forgive me, but I missed something obvious: tsMuxer is not completely reliable for extracting main movie when it's split into multiple *.m2ts files. And I'll just bet this movie is. So if you're willing to start over, try this:

1) Extract main movie from a full-disc rip with Clown_BD. This *is* reliable for producing a single-*.m2ts file. Specify a demux and a remux location, de-select all subtitles except the one containing your forced subs. (You can at this point convert your audio as well if desired, to "core" audio or AC3). There should be no remaining references to deleted tracks.

2) Use the sub track demuxed by Clown_BD to extract your forced subs with BDSup2Sub. Make sure the force flag is on.

3) NOW you can use tsMuxer to replace the original sub track with the one you extracted, and identify it as English if you like.

4) Try again with BDRB.

And if the above doesn't work, I'm afraid I'm out of ideas at the moment. BDEdit can adjust the disc structure, but no one will say it's easy to use. Even the author admits he doesn't fully understand BD structure, not being privy to the full specifications. And Avatar was purposely made difficult to work with.

Good luck.

[Drerunsit]

Forgive me, but I missed something obvious: tsMuxer is not completely reliable for extracting main movie when it's split into multiple *.m2ts files. And I'll just bet this movie is. So if you're willing to start over, try this:

1) Extract main movie from a full-disc rip with Clown_BD. This *is* reliable for producing a single-*.m2ts file. Specify a demux and a remux location, de-select all subtitles except the one containing your forced subs. (You can at this point convert your audio as well if desired, to "core" audio or AC3). There should be no remaining references to deleted tracks.

2) Use the sub track demuxed by Clown_BD to extract your forced subs with BDSup2Sub. Make sure the force flag is on.

3) NOW you can use tsMuxer to replace the original sub track with the one you extracted, and identify it as English if you like.

4) Try again with BDRB.

And if the above doesn't work, I'm afraid I'm out of ideas at the moment. BDEdit can adjust the disc structure, but no one will say it's easy to use. Even the author admits he doesn't fully understand BD structure, not being privy to the full specifications. And Avatar was purposely made difficult to work with.

Good luck.

Well, I used the method you provided and this time, BDRB was able to distinguish the forced subs track. I turned that track to ON by defauly and just started the re-encoding process to get it down to BD25. I'll let you know the results.

[Drerunsit]

SUCCESS! Thanks for all the assistance. Rock n roll!

[fritzi93]

Good for you, you caught on fast. Really fast.