Scan iso's for audio and subtitle info

[db1964]

Hi
I've recently used the handbrake gui to encode my dvd collection and while it was eventually successful ( for some reason my TV would crash after 2 to 10 minutes playing the mp4 files that Handbrake created fortunately the mkv files it creates my TV is happy to play ). Nonetheless it was a painful ( literally and figuratively ) process and I would not want to have to do it again. Should that be necessary for some reason ( I don't know maybe I change TV one day and it decides it can't play mkv's ) I would rather use some kind of scripted solution from the command line. For that to be successful though I'm looking for a tool ( maybe it is handbrake , maybe not ) to be able to recursively scan directories of DVD's ( held as iso rips ) and report back a) what audio codecs are available b) what subtitles are available and whether there are any forced subtitles associated with any particular audio track. I can then use that info to make better choices about the command line arguments.

Does anyone know of any tool that could analyse iso files and report on these points (and any others it would be useful to know before scripting Handbrake to encode from command line) ?

[Woodstock]

In the CLI section, there are a couple of scripts that attempt to do what you ask for.

An alternative I use is to create batch files for most encodes, since I rip with MakeMKV before using Handbrake. If I decide to re-encode, I'll re-rip from the original disks, and modify the batch files used for the first encode. Text editors are handy when you're redoing a 200+ episode show!

[db1964]

Hi , Can you point me to the scripts you are referring to please ? I've looked in the scripts forum and all I can find are a couple of people asking for pretty much what I am and being told it is not possible in Handbrake.
To be clear I'm not looking at this stage for scripts to support encoding the iso's , ( that would come next ) all I'm looking for is a scan+report script that would tell me what audio tracks / what subtitle tracks / are any of the subtitles marked as forced for any language etc .

[rollin_eng]

Not sure about HB but eac3to might be able to do what you want.

[Woodstock]

One of the more popular scripts is this one:

[Script] convert episodes or main-feature from DVD or BD or convert multiple files (on any os)

[nhyone]

For that to be successful though I'm looking for a tool ( maybe it is handbrake , maybe not ) to be able to recursively scan directories of DVD's ( held as iso rips ) and report back a) what audio codecs are available b) what subtitles are available and whether there are any forced subtitles associated with any particular audio track. I can then use that info to make better choices about the command line arguments.

There is too much variability for automated scanning. YMMV.

For me, I'll choose to scan manually, but put the settings in a directory or file-specific config file so that they can be re-applied again in the future. The config file contains the crop options, audio track(s), subtitle(s) and filters (e.g. decomb, denoise) to use, for example.

With the idea of a config file, you can do some pre- and post-processing, such as adding chapters, integrating external subtitles and fixing audio track language, for example.