HandBrake

I've done my 300 or so DVDs and gotten everything on to a Mac mini connected to my TV. I bought the BD/DVD combo of The Big Bang Theory S6 a while back when it came out, got the BD/DVD combo of Game Of Thrones S3 a couple weeks ago, bought a cheapy external Bluray player (my first BD player ever) this week for my MacBook, downloaded a trial copy of DVDFab BD Copy, and can't believe how messed up dealing with BD subtitles are when trying to get MP4/M4Vs as the result. I can see there are a whole bunch of subtitle handling extractors and converters out there, but I've never had to use them. Is there a way to, for example, get the forced English subs burned into a GOT episode, and have all of the English as a soft subtitle, and have the output still be MP4? I played with making MKVs (using HB) and just burning the English subs and making the French subs soft, but the French subtitles are huge, and I can't seem to control the size or color or anything (like with VLC). Also, the burned English subs were a kind of hard-to-see light grey, sorta like the current iOS7 coloring scheme of white on light-white. Help? Thanks!

I did.

MP4 doesn't support the subtitle format BD uses, PGS, so you can't have them as soft subs. Thus all hassle to convert them to something else MP4 does support.

Burning in the forced subs isn't too bad, just choose the appropriate options in HB like you would for a DVD.

That works OK, but I'd like to get all the English in there somehow for those times when you just can't understand those bloody Brits. Plus, with that series, especially, I'm always backing up and turning on the subs just to figure out the names of people/places. Can the subs to be made soft be extracted to a srt and then included, or can those only be added to MKV files? (<--I barely know what I'm talking about here.) Aren't VOBSUBs and PGSs kinda the same thing? Images? There's just so many little pieces of info from so many web pages... I don't mind the hassle so much (I'll never buy another Bluray disc . I just have no idea what to do.

The path of least resistance is to find an SRT online and add it in (will become MP4 timed text).

PGS are way more complicated than VOBSUB, and VOBSUB has never been officially supported by MP4 but there's a couple software players that support it.

You can use something like Subtitle Edit to convert the subs to an SRT file, but you have to guide the OCR process, and the workflow with Subtitle Edit isn't exactly intuitive.

SC

Transcode to MKV with forced subs burned in and full soft subs, then remux to MP4 using Subler - it has an OCR engine that can convert the PGS subtitles on the fly.

https://code.google.com/p/subler/

I've also done a bunch of movies with HB, but only recently started paying attention to subtitles. I'm only interested in forced subtitles on movies: the stuff in Captain Phillips, the bits in Star Wars, and, of course, translating Jive from Airplane! I don't have any complaint about HB right now, I'm only asking a procedural question. My normal routine is to use MakeMKV to pull the files off the disc, then use HB to do the conversion. From the reading I've done, part of the trick seems to be figuring out which of the possibly several English subtitle tracks on a movie has the forced subtitles in it. The reading I've done seems to indicate you have to pick the right English track to find them, and it almost seems like which track it is might move around from person to person - is that right? I also don't think about it when I'm watching the movie, so when converting later, I don't always remember that there were subtitles in the movie (converted Airplane without them, and only noticed when I watched it again). Golly!

If you're going to just use HB and not fuss about whether they're burned in, etc, do people have a good routine to:

a) look up ahead of time that there are, in fact, forced subtitles to convert
b) figure out quickly and easily which track(s) the English forced subtitles might be in
c) figure out quickly where they might be to look through the finished file to confirm you got what you want?

I've also recently migrated all my video work from Windows boxes to a Mac Mini. Any of this different between Mac and Windows? My initial looking around feels like the answer is no, but I thought I would ask.

Just procedural questions from a very happy HB user.

JohnJ9 wrote:I've also done a bunch of movies with HB, but only recently started paying attention to subtitles. I'm only interested in forced subtitles on movies: the stuff in Captain Phillips, the bits in Star Wars, and, of course, translating Jive from Airplane! I don't have any complaint about HB right now, I'm only asking a procedural question. My normal routine is to use MakeMKV to pull the files off the disc, then use HB to do the conversion. From the reading I've done, part of the trick seems to be figuring out which of the possibly several English subtitle tracks on a movie has the forced subtitles in it. The reading I've done seems to indicate you have to pick the right English track to find them, and it almost seems like which track it is might move around from person to person - is that right? I also don't think about it when I'm watching the movie, so when converting later, I don't always remember that there were subtitles in the movie (converted Airplane without them, and only noticed when I watched it again). Golly!

If you're going to just use HB and not fuss about whether they're burned in, etc, do people have a good routine to:

a) look up ahead of time that there are, in fact, forced subtitles to convert
b) figure out quickly and easily which track(s) the English forced subtitles might be in
c) figure out quickly where they might be to look through the finished file to confirm you got what you want?

I've also recently migrated all my video work from Windows boxes to a Mac Mini. Any of this different between Mac and Windows? My initial looking around feels like the answer is no, but I thought I would ask.

Just procedural questions from a very happy HB user.

Perhaps your question received no answer because it doesn't really fit under this heading. It's a question that I'd like an answer to also. Maybe repost as a separate question with appropriate title (unless a mod would care to help and repost)?

The whole deal with subtitles is that they are a pain to deal with since the people mastering the disc can do the subtitles in different ways.

I will suggest again, that one might want to use SubtitleEdit to look over the subtitles in stuff that has forced subs. One might have to do a bit of looking to find the OS X compatible version.

SC