Any subtitles in a given subtitle track might be marked as “forced” – this is used to tell the DVD player to display these even if the person hasn’t chosen to see all subtitles from a particular subtitle track – the intended use of this is exactly for brief sections of foreign languages in films, as I understand it. Obviously lots of people prefer not to burn in the subtitles for that reason, but I tend to do this because it means I’m not subject to the vagaries of how different video players handle subtitles, and these rips are only for my own personal use anyway.Īs well as “burning in” subtitles, another concept you might need to know about is of “forced subtitles”. “Burning in” these images from a subtitle track means that you’re overlaying the images before the source video is transcoded, so you can’t remove those subtitles or switch them to other languages afterwards. There are various choices about how you can handle these when ripping, but I prefer what’s really the option that loses most information: “burning in” any subtitles that are there for the purposes of translating foreign language sections into English or are added for comic effect. However, plenty of our DVDs do have brief sections in foreign languages, for example, that you’d expect to be subtitled.
For plenty of films or TV shows there aren’t any points at which you’d expect a subtitle to be shown, so you don’t need to worry about them. One slightly vexing issue that sometimes comes up when doing this is what to do about the subtitle tracks on the DVD. There’s inevitably a loss of quality doing this transcoding, of course, but in most cases I don’t mind.
With some DVDs that are already quite poor quality I’ll just image the disk and copy the ISO to the NAS, but in most cases I use Handbrake to transcode just the titles I want from the DVD using a codec with rather better compression than MPEG-2. I’ve been on a long-running project to rip some of our DVDs to network attached storage, so that playing them is a much more pleasant experience: we can then easily play any of our DVDs around the flat without suffering cute-but-unusable DVD menus, condescending anti-piracy warnings or trashy trailers. I know very little about Handbrake this is just some notes on what I personally do to reduce my confusion about why subtitles aren’t being ripped properly and manually fixing that, but I almost certainly can’t answer any questions about issues you might be having! This is just here in the hope that it might be useful to someone…