Handbrake and subtitles...

I have ripped all my DVD's to disk. This was a very boring job which took me quite some time. I left the movies in .ISO format, but did rip out everything unwanted (fbi warnings, several audio languages and subtitles,...) Basically, I only kept the original English 5.1 audio and both Dutch and English subtitles. Even though this meant I ended up with rather large files (don't really care about that, HD space is cheap nowadays), this worked pretty good. And then I found out that Plex doesn't support .ISO file playing. Grrr...

So this means I'll have to re-encode everything to something else. I think the best option would be MP4 because that would also play on my iPad, but the way I read it, MP4 only allows for one audio/subtitle. So I guess I'll go with .MKV.

I've already re-encoded a few movies with Handbrake, but then noticed that the subtitles now are mis-aligned. On the ISO format, they are on the bottom of the screen, where they should be. Now in MP4 or MKV, they are located a bit below the centre of the screen. That's too high. Is there a way to tell Handbrake to put the subtitles a bit lower? I can't seem to find such a setting.

Thx!

DVDs are normally(?) just a bunch of .mpg files. So perhaps just re-rip the .ISO packages into .mpg with zero-loss (from the original .iso at least)?

When I last still had to deal with low-resolution discs (DVDs), I used "makemkv" for this chore.

I already tried MakeMKV last night, but the package wouldn't install on Windows 10 and would make my anti virus software sound all kinds of alarms. So I didn't insist.
But indeed, I've used MakeMKV in the past and it worked pretty good. I just don't know if it can also do what I would like it to do with the subtitles.

This situation with Plex and the overall space raw rips were taking is what led me to transcoding as well. I can understand their concerns though, they essentially don’t want to embed a DVD player code into Plex since it’s pretty different then any other type of video playback. While DVDs are an MPEG format, they tend to use different parts of the old MPEG-2 standards regarding containers then what happened on the computer side and .MPG containers.

The MP4 container can support multiple subtitle or closed captioned tracks, though it depends on the type. DVDs sometimes have VOBSUB which is literally burned into a video track instead of being rendered at playback time. MP4 is limited to one of those. However the toggalable kinds that render at playback are common in MP4 movie download from iTunes and streaming like Netflix.

Some additional info is here, and I’m not well versed on the transcoding options between the various subtitle formats.

https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/advanced/subtitles.html

Potentially identifying the type may help refine some searches to help with the misalignment issue or other concerns. I’ll try and revisit this thread if I get to my new NAS and media ripping project sometime soon. Sitting on about 400 more DVDs to convert and will be redoing some of my older rips I did in a hurry to free up space.

Thanks Tom! I'll see if I can make some screenshots of an ISO file playing with subs and then the same file as MP4 once Handbrake did its thing with it. You'll immediately notice what I mean specifically.

OK, I've made a couple of screenshots from the move "A Bug's Life", with Dutch subtitles. The first screenshot is from the .ISO file, straight from DVD. The second screenshot is what Handbrake makes of it, after conversion to MP4. You can see that, in the second screenshot, the subtitles are way too high.

Should anybody know how I can fix this, how I can lower the subtitles a bit, I'd be most grateful.

Subtitles are positioned relative to the bottom of the screen. On the DVD, the movie is letterboxed, so the subtitles are positioned "correctly" within the movie image. Once Handbrake crops the movie, the image fills the screen, so the subtitle position relative to the bottom of the screen means that they now appear in the middle of the screen. As far as I can tell, Handbrake does not provide any options to account for this during a crop. There's a post here with a workflow to solve this, but the referenced software -- DVDSubEdit -- appears to be pretty old.

The only other option (aside from patching Handbrake) is to have Handbrake use soft subtitles (i.e. don't burn them into the image). Then use VLC for playback, which lets you reposition subtitles.

But in his example, the subtitle position is terrible in both cases. Imagine if the film weren't letterboxed, let's say it was a 4:3 ratio video that was made for television. The subtitle position would be terrible even in that situation.



Yes, this. Definitely this.



... Or use just about any program, VLC or otherwise, for playback. I can't think of any decent movie playback engine these days which doesn't have subtitle support built in.

Wait a minute.

Those screen shots show that he is indeed using VLC for playback. What if he wasn't baking the subtitles into the video in the first place, and he merely needs to adjust the subtitle positioning in VLC?

Maybe this case isn't handbrake's problem at all.

No, I can tell that the letters are vertically squished in the lower screenshot due to the compensation for the letterboxing. They're baked in. Yeah, that's the root of the problem.

You're right Tony. I just found out about this setting in Handbrake. If I uncheck it I can put multiple subtitles into one MP4 file as well, so that's bonus.

The subtitle location is still bad, but indeed, in VLC I can pretty easily move the subtitles lower. Which is what I will do.

Thanks for all the help guys! Seriously!

Now I'm in doubt if I will compress the ISO's using H.264 or H.265. H.265 compresses about 30 to 40% better than H.264 does, but it takes up to one hour for a 90 minute movie to compress, while H.264 takes a mere 8 minutes. Oh well, guess I'll only be doing this once, so I might as well do it right. It'll take me months though...