subtitles: forced, default or burned in

General questions or discussion about HandBrake, Video and/or audio transcoding, trends etc.
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metropical
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2011 6:09 pm

subtitles: forced, default or burned in

Post by metropical »

I know what burned in are, but what is default supposed to result in?
And forced?
Just did a pass in default and had none.
Woodstock
Veteran User
Posts: 4620
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2013 6:39 am

Re: subtitles: forced, default or burned in

Post by Woodstock »

Default means "Set the flag that says this is the default subtitle track to use, in hope that someday, I will encounter a playback device that knows what it means."

Forced are subtitles that are flagged to be played even when you aren't generally wanting subtitles. They are sometimes called "Foreign audio", and have translations of things that are NOT part of the dub - say, a passage of German in a otherwise English movie. Again, this is a flag that primarily exists in the specification of DVD and BD disks, but is rarely seen outside of a lab. I've only found one movie that "properly" set the Forced flag, Avatar.

If you tell handbrake to only use the "forced" subtitles, and there are no subtitles with that flag, you will get no subtitles. Most TV and movie disks with subtitles will put a separate track in for the "forced" subtitles, and there will be no flag. That track is often also flagged as "default".
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