Help nderstanding CC and Forced Subs

[trigger638]

Need a little help and I cannot seem to find any good information.

Will someone please take a second to explain what Closed Captioning is and why I might want to include it in a backup?

I do understand what a Forced Sub is, but how do I know if the movie has them? Is there a way to find out? It has been mentioned that some films have a seperate sub stream for Forced Subs, but how does one identify these?

Thanks in advance.

[McPoodle]

Well, I can tackle the Closed Captions question. If you live in North America, your TV should have the option to turn closed captions on and off for certain shows (the nightly news and anything on PBS in particular). DVD closed captions are the same thing. If the DVD has subtitles, you don't really need captions as well. Some DVD's only have captions, in which case you might want to use VobSub to extract them and convert them to subtitles, since subtitles are a lot easier to edit than captions. Also, lots of DVD authoring tools will accept subtitles, but only Scenarist, Maestro, and DVDStudio Pro will encode closed captions. On the other hand, closed captions are stored inside of the video file, so when you rip the DVD, you are already getting the captions. The extra step is to get rid of them, not to add them in.

For forced subs, I know a lot less, so I'm probably going to tell you stuff you already know. Neither SubRip nor VobSub will tell you if a subtitle stream is forced, so I guess there's no easy way to tell. I'd say, if you extract more than one English stream and one of them's a lot smaller than the other, then the smaller one is probably a forced stream. The only way to tell for sure is if the DVD was encoded with forced streams in multiple languages (which in my mind is the only reason not to burn them into the video in the first place). If by changing your default subtitle language on the DVD player (with subtitles off) you get different language text on the screen, then there must be forced subtitles involved.

[trigger638]

McPoodle, thanks a lot for sharing that info, it is helpfull. Now the CC makes sense to me. It is a different way to include subtitles. The only gotcha here is if the film does not have a subtitle stream, but does have cc's.

The forced sub thing is a mess. I have been reading everything and anything relating to this. There is a lot of infomation on how to create forced subs, but when it comes to identifing them, everyone kinda skips that part.

I did find out however that SubRip has a global setting called Forced Subs Only. Now I am not sure if this works, but if it does one could process all the streams with this flag on and off, import the results in Scenarist, compair the two streams. In this case you could potentialy place the forced stream under the full stream and check forced in the main stream for everything that needed to be. Then simply remove the forced only stream and you should be good.

I do not take credit for the above method as I read it somewhere on these boards, or is a guide related to these boards. However, there is a serious lack of information on this subject, so hopefully this will help someone. I have yet to try it myself, but I will the very next time I suspect forced subs in a project.