4 Closed Captions in MKV, MCEBuddy only extracts and converts 1 to .SRT

Most of my movies have not only dual audio but 4 subtitles as closed captions. These are EIA-608 subtitles. I can’t confirm but I suspect that each audio file has the subtitles in them and since the audio streams are English and Spanish that the corresponding subtitles are both English and Spanish in each one.

MCEBuddy extracts only the English subtitle and converts it to an .SRT file…unfortunately I need them in Spanish mostly but like the English to be available also.

Is there a way to get MCEBuddy to extract all the subtitle files? If there are redundant English/Spansh subtitles in each audio stream is there a way to just keep one of each?

Thank You

PS…I am using the latest beta of MCEBuddy on a Windows 8.1 machine

I can try to assist you with some answers, however some items may vary based on your version and file type you have, and may be converting to. Different types support different options.

To be sure you can either look at the file while it is going through MCEBuddy conversion, right click the file in the status window, and click “Media Info”, and it will display various details about the file including audio languages. I highly recommend a free program called “MediaInfo” that will give you more details about the file including what languages the subtitles are available for and the subtitle format in the file. You can also use something like “VLC Media Player” to play the file, and view subtitle options available.

Secondly, on that same point, if a file has audio in another language, it has been my experience that it does not necessarily mean that a subtitle is also available in that same language. You would need to check the file to confirm.

In the settings options for your Conversion Tasks (whichever task you use to extract the subtitles), click that item, click CHANGE, then click then “Advanced Settings” option (little icon with up and down arrows, at the bottom are your Audio and subtitle options. Be sure “Select best soundtrack” option is UNchecked, otherwise this would limit the conversion to only 1 audio file. Unchecked will extract ALL audio files. Be sure that whatever format you are converting to will accept multiple audio files. (MP4, MKV for example).

If you wish to limit the conversion to one audio file, you would CHECK the “Select best soundtrack”, and then choose your language of choice below that.

Further down you will see the Subtitles option. Be sure it is checked to extract subtitles. Hold your mouse over the option to see exactly which file formats support this option.

Further down, you will see “Expert Settings”. If you click that, you can check the “Add subtitles” option if you want the subtitles embedded with the file (MKV or MP4 formats), otherwise the previous setting of “extract Subtitles” will add an external SRT file that contains the subtitles, and if there are multiple languages, it will add the language code to the subtitle file.

Yes, choose the "Extract Subtitles and Closed Captions"option to extract ALL subtitle files. It would only limit you to one if you had chosen the “Select best soundtrack option” OR if the file only had subtitles for one language in it. Remember that audio tracks and subtitle tracks are not the same. Many of my over-the-air recordings in the USA have Spanish language as an audio option, but there are no Spanish subtitle in the files.

Hops this helps.

1 Like

Thank you for your advice. I have found out more about my TV recordings since I posted this thread. I have been using Mediainfo for years and that was one of the programs that told me I have multiple CCs in each file, unfortunately I did not understand how to interpret all the information.

Paul Hodges over at the Emby forums wrote me a script to scan all my existing movies in their respective folders and determine if and how many CC streams are in each file and to then extract all available streams to individual SRT files in the folder with the movie.

These are EIA-608 captions and Paul did some research and found that all NTSC recordings have 4 text file placeholders in them even if they contain no actual subtitles…and that Stream 1 and 3 are usually for English and Spanish respectively if the content provider adds them.

So although all my software shows four CC streams most of my files have only one subtitle in English and the other three are empty, while a few have no subtitles at all.

Paul’s script uses CCextractor to extract all available CC streams for me and processes the files automatically in their own directory so I don’t have to reprocess them through MCEBuddy and thus don’t have to copy/move around a bunch of files to accomplish this task. My libraries stay in tact except they now all have the respective SRT file in them that was recorded with the movie.

Many thanks to Paul Hodges over at the Emby forums!!