Makemkv Subtitles Srt

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Carolina Bornman

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Aug 3, 2024, 4:06:07 PM8/3/24

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MakeMKV is widely used to rip protected DVD and Blu-ray discs as MakeMKV does not alter the bitstream content of the ripped dvd/bluray/UHD (other than you may include/exclude content such as sound tracks, subtitles, videos from the output). It seems to be simple to rip a DVD with MakeMKV, however, there are many confusions about DVD subtitles in MakeMKV, such as forced subtitles, MakeMKV subtitles missing, how to extract subtitles, PGS/VOBSUB subtitles, etc. In this article, you can find all the answers.

Step 4. Select a destination folder where you want to save the ripped DVD files. MakeMKV will display a list of titles and audio tracks from the DVD. Any existing subtitles will be shown and selectable when you expand each individual title. Check the boxes next to the titles you want to rip.

Step 5. If you want MakeMKV includes all subtitles in the ripped DVD, make sure the "Forced only" and "All" boxes next to the desired subtitle tracks are checked. If you only want to rip forced subtitles (subtitles for foreign language parts or important translations), select "Forced only."
Step 6. Click the "Make MKV" button to begin the ripping process. MakeMKV will extract the selected subtitles, titles, and audio tracks, from the DVD and save them as MKV files in the specified output folder.

Some users are reporting errors like not getting subtitle streams in MakeMKV settings or there are no subtitle streams from MakeMKV ripped DVD video. Why is the subtitle missing in MakeMKV? There are few reasons:

First, have you set a preferred language in Preferences? If yes, MakeMKV will only select subtitles that match your preferred language. You would have to manually select the others, or the MakeMKV ripped MKV video will not have subtitles in other languages. To preserve all subtitle tracks, go to Preference > Language, and set the Preferred language to None.

This is because the default MakeMKV profile having a setFirstSubtitleTrackAsDefault settings which is set to true. So you need to change this setting by making your own profile that sets setFirstSubtitleTrackAsDefault to false to avoid MakeMKV subtitles always on:

1. Copy default.mmcp.xml from C:\Program Files (x86)\MakeMKV\appdata.tar\ (on macOS, the file default.mmcp.xmp is located in /Applications/MakeMKV.app/Contents/Resources/appdata.tar) to the MakeMKV data directory, likely C:\Users\\.MakeMKV (/Users/"username"/Library/MakeMKV on Mac) 2. Rename the file to something unique like myprofile.mmcp.xml 3. Edit the file in Notepad and change the name on line 4 from ":5086" to something meaningful like "My Profile" 4. Change setFirstSubtitleTrackAsDefault on line 11 to "false". 5. Open MakeMKV, open Preferences, check the Expert Mode box. Go to the Advanced tab, and change the Default Profile to "My Profile" (or whatever you named it). 6. Rip the disc again and the resulting MKV will not have default subtitles.

The vast majority of content with dubbed audio and subtitles will have a separate track for what most people call "forced subtitles". It's much cleaner from the disc authors' perspective because not all players recognize and utilize the "forced" flag.

2. Rip the DVD with MakeMKV with all subtitles selected, then use MediaInfo on the ripped MKV file to identify which subtitle track is the forced one (normally, the forced subtitles should have a relatively small number of elements, compared to "full" subtitles.). Then use MKVToolNix to create a new MKV, you make the forced subtitle the first track and then set default and forced flags on it.

Why are MakeMKV Blu-ray subtitles not working while the subtitle files fripped from DVDs work fine? Bluray subtitles are graphic images in a format called "PGS", which has limited (but improving) player support. DVD uses a graphic image format called "VOBSUB", which is supported by more players, but not universally (Chromecast can't handle either one, for example, and many Android player do not display VOBSUB or PGS). So you need to check if your player supports PGS subtitles. If not, you will see MakeMKV Blu-ray subtitles missing or not working on the player.
To handle the PGS subtitles, you can:

1. Handbrake can pass thru or burn in certain subtitle formats, but it can't convert image based to text based. You can use Subtitles Edit to convert the PSG subtitles to SRT. Load your MKV file into Subtitle Edit and it can convert image based subtitles (PGS, VOBSUB, etc.) to .SRT using OCR. 2. If the PGS subtitles prove too difficult to convert, download SRT subtitles from somewhere like subscene.com oropensubtitles.org, then use MKVToolnix to demux/remux your mkv files. You can make other correct subtitles as default, remove the PGS subs, or add the downloaded SRT subtitles to the MKv file. It will not require re-encoding the files and runs really fast.

Donna Peng's fascination with multimedia began at an early age - shortly after she licked the physical disc and then she's been obsessed ever since. Her decade-long career at Digiarty after the graduation has seen her unmatched expertise in the field of DVD, digital video, software and anything related to home theatre. She is currently fascinated with photography.

I have been using MakeMKV to rip DVDs to my hard drive. This program works OK, but produces very inefficient files. Resulting video files from Blu-Rays are typically 35GB or more. I would like to use ffmpeg to re-pack these files, mkv to mkv, while keeping all the subtitles. I have a good video card (nvidia RTV 2060), so I would like to do it with hardware encoding, since these are feature-length movies.

My movies are direct MKV rips from my discs, and all include the English subtitle track. For most of my films I do not want subtitles shown as they are in English, but on films where there are sections of foreign language conversation (such as in Sicario 2) where I want those to be subtitled so that I can understand what is being said. I can manually turn the subtitles on and off showing that they are correctly encoded in the rip, but this subtitles everything including English language conversation and audio descriptions of music.

Playing the discs directly works like this. I have tried a number of settings, including only forced subtitles (which is what I assumed it would be) and can only seem to get either no subtitles, or subtitles all of the time (including audio descriptions). What settings do I need to change?

I have ripped the UHD BD using MakeMKV and just used the standard options. This seems to have included the main title and two sets of English subtitle tracks, both of which look like they also include forced subtitles:

Without having to go back and re-rip several films to only included forced subtitles, how do I determine which of these three subtitle tracks are the forced ones (or is it just a trial and error process)? I presume then I can just flag them as such, and Kodi will do the rest.

Sorted by figuring out which of the saved subtitle tracks was the correct one and setting its flag to forced in MKVToolNix. OSMC now correctly picks this up and plays it without playing all of the other subtitles.

Sometimes this is a language issue: even though one title canhold multiple languages of audio, or even subtitles, sometimesfilms will have different editions to change languages oftext shown on screen. Things like signs, titles shown on-screen,etc. Animated films, like those made by Pixar, tend to do thisquite a lot with on-screen signage.

My first approach is to do a search; sometimes you can find aforum post that answers the question. When you do find a post thatanswers the question, it will be answered in the form of a mplsto rip. An example could be 00800.mpls.

Alternatively, you can take the brute-force approach, which iswhat I usually do: rip everything and just try playing them.I take a look for on-screen text and forced subtitles.I also scrub through the file and make sure it looks, at aglance, like everything happens in the correct order.

DVD and Blu Ray discs use an image based form of captions. On DVDs they're called VOBSUB, and Blu Ray uses PGS. Neither type of caption is supported by Roku devices. Only text based captions are supported. These text based captions be be embedded within the container, such as EIA-608 captions from OTA broadcasts, or external text files, such as the SRT format. There are programs that are supposed to be able to extract the image based caption and save them to an SRT file, but I've never successfully used them.

The only files with embedded captions that display the captions successfully on my Roku devices are OTA recordings that I've saved in the TS format. These files could also be saved in the MKV container, but my video editing software strips captions out when saving to MKV, so I stick with the TS container. But several different containers are capable of keeping text based captions within them.

@Kryten79 Roku does support subtitles in MKV files. But only if they're text based. Image based captions (which are used on almost all DVD and Blu Ray discs) are not supported. I don't know the complexities of decoding image based captions, but it might not be possible with the hardware Roku uses. I simply don't know the answer to that.

MKV is a container, and can hold almost any video and audio codec and caption style. Same as MP4, AVI, TS/M2TS, and others. Just because the file extension is a certain three/four letters, you can't determine what is within the container.

Yes, thanks for the ridiculously fast reply. I rip my blu-ray dvds to the NAS as MKV with embedded subs. I bought a new ultra 2022 a few days ago and love the ATMOS sound and 4K video. I was just surprised I can't get the subtitles to display. The Roku Ultra should have enough horsepower, but I do realize MKV is a container and many codecs can be used.

Yes, VLC can play virtually anything on any platform. But they have specifically said they would not be writing a version for Roku, as the RokuOS is not compatible with the programming language they use.