Playing Subtitles on Discs Without Them

[MichaelB]

All I need are MakeMKV (for initial extraction), MKVToolNix (for subsequent addition/removal of subtitles, audio etc.) and something to handle the subtitles.

(I haven’t often needed to add new audio tracks, but I do have an MKV of Lost Highway with the Tim Lucas commentary, famously released separately via his website after David Lynch vetoed its inclusion on the actual disc.)

The only other tool you need besides those two is some subtitling software. Because I produce subtitles as an increasingly major part of my day job, I use professional software (Annotation Edit in my case), but there are loads of free options that will at least allow you to retime and resync stuff where necessary.

[MichaelB]

Talking of resyncing, another thing MKVToolNix is great for is resyncing soundtracks and subtitles that are slightly off. For instance, the English subtitles on Gaumont’s Danton seem to have slipped slightly at the encoding stage, but it’s now possible to move them backwards or forwards with literally millisecond precision.

Although sadly this doesn’t work with burned-in subtitles like Facets’ notoriously out-of-sync ones. Or at least burned-in subtitles at the video level: if they’re electronic but compulsory, you can simply turn the “compulsory” flag off.

[spectre]

This is pretty exciting. Are Oppo players the only ones that can do this? Or are people aware of other brands with the same capabilities?

[senseabove]

Reavon has said they intend to add it as a feature in a future firmware update for their new X100 and X200 players. Those players are also, at the moment, BD region-switchable from a secret menu, so if that ability survives until they implement external subs, I'll likely pick one up and finally have One Player to Play Them All.

[kekid]

I tried downloading and installing MakeMKV on my Mac. Mac won't let me do it, saying "unknown developer" with Malware risk. Any way forward?

[MichaelB]

It's perfectly legit - that's just a boilerplate response for anything that isn't sold by "identified developers".

Go to Preferences/Security & Privacy and it should ask you if you want to install it.

[spectre]

Thanks to this thread, I just plonked down $500 on a second-hand Oppo BDP-103 at Cash Converters – wish me luck! To quote famous real guy Aladdin, it'll be "a whole new world" if this works out...

[TMDaines]

I watch most of my discs on my HTPC. To watch subtitles files alongside Blu-ray discs, I use PotPlayer. DVDFab Passkey to decrypt the disc.

[swo17]

I've been avoiding foreign releases that aren't English-friendly for so long that I don't have a good handle on what's out there that I can now watch with subtitles using the Oppo trick discussed in this thread. If people throw out recommendations (i.e. noteworthy films unavailable anywhere with English subs, but with at least one other subtitle track on the disc) I can summarize them in the first post.

For starters, it's my understanding that the Gaumont Blu-ray for Polanski's J'accuse has a French HoH subtitle track

[hearthesilence]

I've been avoiding foreign releases that aren't English-friendly for so long that I don't have a good handle on what's out there that I can now watch with subtitles using the Oppo trick discussed in this thread. If people throw out recommendations (i.e. noteworthy films unavailable anywhere with English subs, but with at least one other subtitle track on the disc) I can summarize them in the first post.

For starters, it's my understanding that the Gaumont Blu-ray for Polanski's J'accuse has a French HoH subtitle track

First title that comes to mind is the German Blu-ray of Fassbinder's Martha, arguably one of his very best films. There are probably a lot of French Blu-rays like Chabrol's La Cérémonie that look great, have not been released in the U.S. but lack English subtitles. (Gaumont seems to be better than most about including English subtitles though.)

Also if you want to list non-English friendly upgrades, I recently discovered that the French Blu-ray for Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day is preferable to Criterion's. Also there's Visconti's The Leopard - Criterion did NOT use the Film Foundation restoration. Madman in Australia did and it's far better, but it's now impossible to find for a decent price. Forgot which, but at least one still-available Blu-ray reissue in the EU (Italy?) uses the restoration, but it's not English-friendly.

[swo17]

German Blu-ray of Fassbinder's Martha
French Blu-ray of Chabrol's La Cérémonie
French Blu-ray of Yang's A Brighter Summer Day
Italian Blu-ray of Visconti's The Leopard

To be clear, I only want to list discs that are not English-friendly but that include at least one subtitle track in some other language. Is this true of any of the titles you have mentioned here?

[hearthesilence]

To be clear, I only want to list discs that are not English-friendly but that include at least one subtitle track in some other language. Is this true of any of the titles you have mentioned here?

Just checked:
German Blu-ray of Fassbinder's Martha - no subtitles
French Blu-ray of Chabrol's La Cérémonie - yes, a subtitle track
French Blu-ray of Yang's A Brighter Summer Day - yes
Italian Blu-ray of Visconti's The Leopard[/quote] - yes, and supposedly one in English - can anyone confirm? (also, is there a black level problem too?)

[swo17]

The Chabrol and Yang are Carlotta releases, correct? Does the French release of La Cérémonie improve upon the Artificial Eye Blu-ray?

[senseabove]

There's now a free firmware patch for the Panasonic 420/820/9000 that enables external subtitles. Can confirm it works for both UHD and BD.

FWIW, I used a Mac to format a thumbdrive as ExFat and it didn't create a readable file structure for the Panasonic (it saw the drive, but just said "There are no files in this folder."), so I ended up using the virtual machine created for the patch application to format it again. That did the trick, and now the /sub/sub.srt file loads.

Another user is working on a separate patch to make the external subtitles less ugly, but I didn't try that one out.