Foreign Audio Scan behaving erratically

[frankvw]

Using Handbrake 1.1.0 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, I am currently trying to rip my Lord of the Rings Special Extended Edition DVD set, because the "raw" VIDEO_TS folders take up far too much harddisk space on my home theatre system (about 50GB). Ripping the first one (The Fellowship of the Ring) is no problem; the Elvish dialogue with English subs is detected, extracted and burned into the video stream as intended. However, ripping the other two episodes (The Two Towers and The Return of the King) with exactly the same Handbrake settings produce MKV files that don't have these subs.

Foreign Audio Scan settings:
Forced subitles only -> Off
Burn into video -> on
Set default track -> off

I have run into this same problem with other DVDs as well: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. In all cases the use of foreign language is well under the 10% limit.

I'm including two bastebinned activity logs: one of the first "Fellowship of the Ring" DVD (which works) and one of the second "The Two Towers" DVD (which doesn't work). For this example I'm ripping directly from the DVD, but if I rip to harddisk first (e.g. using DVDfab and ripping the entire DVD so as to ensure that all required tracks are included) the behaviour is exactly the same.

Here's the one that works: https://pastebin.com/952JN1gy
Here's the one that doesn't: https://pastebin.com/WFAVqTHE

On the DVDs that don't work, Handbrake does not perform the extra pass to scan for foreign audio subs at all but immediately begins encoding. This reflects in the log entry "[13:43:54] Skipping subtitle scan. No suitable subtitle tracks" in the second activity log. However, both DVDs behave correctly when played from the original files in the VIDEO_TS file using the same players (DVD player, Kodi, etc.)

How do I get this to work?

I am also unclear on how to find the subtitle track in the original DVD that has these occasional foreign language subs in it. This track (that DVD players use by default if no other subtitle settings are chosen) does not seem to appear in the list of subtitle tracks displayed by Handbrake, Subrip or VLC. Could anyone explain that to me?

Tnx!

// FvW

[Woodstock]

When there is only one subtitle, the scan does not occur; You cannot compare different tracks to find which one is the "foreign audio only" subtitle when there is less than two.

Since you did not provide for an alternate selection, using FAS only failed. You can get the subtitles by specifying track 1.

Foreign Audio Scan works for a lot of cases, but it does not cover everything. Subtitles are a place where disk authors like to screw with your brain.

[JohnAStebbins]

For DVD and BD you should also be enabling "Forced" during the scan. It will do the scan even with only one subtitle in this case and If HandBrake sees a subtitle with some forced entries, it will choose that as the "foreign language subtitle".

[frankvw]

Woodstock, I was beginning to suspect that: subtitles appear to be complete hacks rather than a properly followed standard more often than not.

JohnAStebbins: THANK YOU, SIR!! That did the trick!

[JohnAStebbins]

Your welcome. FYI, *many* things about DVD are a complete hack But other formats aren't much better TBH. A/V formats were designed to be watched by humans, not parsed by machines