Convert media hardcoding subtitles

[BillybobBilly]

I've been going through the process of converting most of my television shows to MP4 to reduce the amount of transcoding that is done between the server and user. One issue I've noticed, however, is regularly MKV files with subtitles will convert and hardcode the subtitles instead of saving them as an external file. This appears to happen only when converting files that have one embedded subtitle option. If a file has multiple languages embedded it will pull the subtitle information correctly and save each language as a separate file.

This is especially annoying when it comes to anime where the subtitles don't regularly match the english-language dialogue if there are multiple audio sources for language present.

To clarify the conversion settings. I am doing

Replace original file
Save for Mobile
Retain original quality

Using Emby version 4.6.7.0 currently because the 4.7 branch has shown lower performance numbers in tests on my setup

[visproduction]

Converting automatically would be nice.  I think the process is somewhat complex and 3rd party software does this already.  The subtitle software is more likely to keep everything up to date  and that probably takes a lot of dev time.  I think trying to build something to pull from mkv files into Emby might be a lot of work and require continuous updating. 

I pull my subtitles from online collections by people who donate their work to the libraries and save the file as [same title as the move].en.srt.  the two letters, dot srt define the langauge.  Keeping the first part of the subtitle file name the same allows the subtitle to be recognized for the media page.  

Some online libraries mostly for movies.

• https://english-subtitles.org/
• https://subscene.com/
• https://www.podnapisi.net/
• https://www.srtfiles.com/
• https://yts-subs.com/
• https://moviesubtitlesrt.com/  (annoying pop-up ads)
• https://www.addic7ed.com/

There is an online time-shifter that is useful to move subtitles to start sooner or later.  https://subtitletools.com/subtitle-sync-shifter

Here is a nice breakdown of ways to pull subtitles off of .mkv files. https://moviemaker.minitool.com/moviemaker/extract-subtitles-from-mkv.html

Hope that helps.

[BillybobBilly]

1 hour ago, visproduction said:

Converting automatically would be nice.  I think the process is somewhat complex and 3rd party software does this already.  The subtitle software is more likely to keep everything up to date  and that probably takes a lot of dev time.  I think trying to build something to pull from mkv files into Emby might be a lot of work and require continuous updating. 

I pull my subtitles from online collections by people who donate their work to the libraries and save the file as [same title as the move].en.srt.  the two letters, dot srt define the langauge.  Keeping the first part of the subtitle file name the same allows the subtitle to be recognized for the media page.  

Some online libraries mostly for movies.

• https://english-subtitles.org/
• https://subscene.com/
• https://www.podnapisi.net/
• https://www.srtfiles.com/
• https://yts-subs.com/
• https://moviesubtitlesrt.com/  (annoying pop-up ads)
• https://www.addic7ed.com/

There is an online time-shifter that is useful to move subtitles to start sooner or later.  https://subtitletools.com/subtitle-sync-shifter

Here is a nice breakdown of ways to pull subtitles off of .mkv files. https://moviemaker.minitool.com/moviemaker/extract-subtitles-from-mkv.html

Hope that helps.

Thanks for your response but I'm not quite sure you understand my issue.

Emby already has automatic conversion of file types. The issue I'm having isn't related to adding/finding subtitles or anything like this.

The issue I'm having is specifically something that occurs when Emby tries to convert an MKV file that has embedded subtitles of only one language. If you use the convert media function from within Emby, on a MKV file with embedded subtitles of only one language the resulting MP4 file will have hardcoded subtitles (by this I mean they will always have the former subtitles turned on with no way to turn them off). On an MKV file with multiple languages of subtitles embedded it will do what it should be doing and save each language as a separate external subtitle file that can be turned on/off correctly.

I may have put this in the wrong section but this is more/less a bug report.

 

Edited July 4 by BillybobBilly

[Luke]

@BillybobBilly

Hi, this goes by the subtitle preferences of the Emby user doing the conversion, so to avoid this, you'll need to set their subtitle mode to No Subtitles.

We plan to expand on this in future updates to provide more control by adding subtitle options directly into the conversion dialog.

Having said that, I'm not sure that 4.7 will do this as I may have already removed it based on user feedback, so you might want to consider updating and then we can look at your performance problem.

Thanks.