Maintaining subtitles where foreign language spoken

[scott23bowman]

Hi Guys,

A common problem I come across is where a movie has more than english spoken in the film... when the foreign language is spoken, subtitles are provided in the normal stream of the movie.

When I copy such a movie, those subtitles are not copied across.

What settings do I need to adjust to keep those subtitles for spoken foreign language?

Thanks for your help.

Scott

[Woodstock]

What you are referring to is "Foreign Audio" subtitles, also known as "forced".

Generally speaking, if a title is available with both original and dubbed audio, there will be two subtitle tracks; one for "everything", and one for just the places where signs and writing are used.

For something like The Longest Day, where the majority of the language is English, but with German and French mixed in, the subtitles will depend on the disk authors. The Longest Day was done with the subtitles being "burned in" as part of the video; there is no subtitle track. Avatar went a different way; there are "full" subtitle tracks (all audio), but some individual subtitles are flagged as "forced", so they're displayed even if subtitles are generally turned of (this is actually rather rare).

The most likely scenario is two tracks per language. What is important is to make sure the correct track is the FIRST one found in your MKV file. You may have to use a tool like mkvmerge to rearrange things, although I prefer handbrake, since I'll also be re-encoding the video.

[Glenn]

For The Longest Day, specifically, and possibly for others, the subtitles are shown in a black section below the picture. As a result, you have to use custom cropping and then set the bottom margin to 0 in order to show these subtitles. No other special settings are needed.

[preserve]

...the subtitles are shown in a black section below the picture. As a result, you have to use custom cropping and then set the bottom margin to 0 in order to show these subtitles.

Depending on if you’re talking about burned-in subtitles or regular subtitles, and I assume you’re talking about Handbrake, as MakeMKV does not crop the video.

If you mean burned-in subtitles then yes, you may accidentally crop them with Handbrake. Regular subtitles will get repositioned by the player if you crop the black bars from letterboxed aspect ratios.