Subtitles and .mkv?

[speters415]

I have been using makemkv to backup my blu rays and I have been selecting both the forced and normal english subtitles. I then use handbrake, with the high preset, to get a smaller file. Now I know that handbrake gets rid of the PGS subtitles. I have done some research and found out that I need to extract the subtitles then remux them back together with my .mkv file I get from handbrake. I read that mkvtoolnix (mkvmerge) will extract the subtitles and then I could just remux it all back together again. So in mkvmerge I select just the two subtitles then start muxing, but I end up with another .mkv file. I am pretty sure that it is just the subtitles because the file is only 88.6mb and my original .mkv file is 25.79gb. So I am assuming that I need to change the extension of the 88.6mb subtitles file before I could remux it, but what extension do I use? Is this the correct way of going about getting forced subtitles back into my handbrake processed .mkv file? I plan on playing the files back with XMBC.

Thanks,
Steve

[SideShowBob]

I'm not sure if it's available for Mac, but you should try something like MKVextractGUI. The process you are going through is not extracting the subtitles, it is re-muxing them into another MKV file. You need to use the extract commands to get them out of the MKV.

One thing I have found is that sometimes it extracts them, but puts an odd extension on them (I mainly use it on windows) so I just have to rename them to "subtitle.sup".

[thisisalex]

PGS subtitles cannot be handled by Handbrake nor any other player (at least, properly... since XBMC can but renders like sh... so far). If you want to keep subtitles from BluRay to MKV, you have to extract them from your original ISO file (or file structure on a hard drive) with EAC3TO (Windows) into a .SUP file (binary), then OCR it with SupRip in order to create a .SRT (text) file that can be muxed into a .MKV file (with MKVToolNix for example) or directly used by the last release of Handbrake in order to be playable by QuickTime, AppleTV or so.

I'm doing that all the time, it works perfectly... despite the fact that it is a very long process, but you have at the end a perfect non compressed .MKV file.

Good luck.