I searched these forums, and others too, I read many examples of this going wrong, but no automated solutions. So I played with various subtitle extractors, etc, I could indeed get subtitles to work in mkv files, but it needed a lot of manual intervention.
It bothered my that DVD players always enable the right subtitle, but rippers don't seem to get it. So I did more digging, and then used PgcEdit to walk through the DVD structures. I found that one of the pre-steps for the main movie sets the audio/subtitle streams:
Code: Select all
-- pre 4 : (SetSTN) Set Audio stream = 0 ; Set Sub-picture stream = 5, on
-> sprm(1:Audio stream number) = 0 (0x0000)
-> sprm(2:Sub-picture stream number) = 69 (0x0045)
My question is this: does MakeMKV have the ability to read through the structure and discover this, or is it not designed with that in mind?
Note for ripping and maintaining full structure - rip to an ISO image (and create more flexible files from there), this then still works with all functionality (and irritations like forced sections) in software players.