Subtitle questions

[Prof Yaffle]

Hi all

First post so pls be gentle... Having lurked on the forum for the last couple of years & had a K demo back in Jan'11, I've finally recognised the merits of the phrase 'quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten'. My 1U server with 3TB discs & M700 vault arrived last week.

I've set-up myself - fairly easy as just the one room - and have been starting on the import of my DVDs & BluRays. Note I'm in the UK so R2 DVDs & Region B BluRays.

I've watched a couple of the imported movies and am puzzled about subtitles. I have these set on the Installer webpage as "I prefer to hear movies in their original language. If that's not English, show English subtitles." Basically I want my movies to work the way they do on my standalone DVD / BluRay player - play in English with non-English bits subtitled.

On 'Avatar' this works fine - the alien language appears in English subtitles on screen without me needing to do anything. However, on 'Syriana' & 'Bourne Ultimatum' DVDs the foreign language sections do not automatically show with English subtitles - I have to select them manually via Info->Subtitles on the remote.

This is not the behaviour I was expecting from a premium, quality, product; just seems off to me that the K player isn't demonstrating the functionality included in relatively basic DVD/BluRay players. Is this an issue with these R2 DVDs that may be solved by sending the discs off to K under the Loan program... or this something I have to live with??

Appreciate any thoughts/advice from those more experienced...

Thanks
Simon

 

[JerryL]

Simon welcome and I have the same criticism and I'd like to see K fix this. It shouldnt be so hard.

 

[josh]

Welcome Simon! Glad to have you...

You're definitely not alone... Subtitles are definitely not consistent across disc pressings, regions, AND in the way that K seems to handle them.

There are ways that disc authors can "force" subtitles to come up in certain regions when the audio track is playing in a certain language. Forced subtitles, as their name implies, are meant to come up regardless of your Subtitles setting on your DVD player. Avatar discs, as you point out, do this well. Most major releases with occasional foreign language dialog, do this right, but not all.

If the ENTIRE movie is in a non-english language for its dialog, and it's not coming up automatically with subtitles for you in R2, then I'm pretty sure Kaleidescape can fix this with their Movieguide metadata. They may want to borrow the disc form you, or they may be able to do it just with the SKU number of that disc.

However, if it's like Avatar, and there are a few non-english lines of dialog and those should be coming up with subtitles and they're not, then this may not be able to be solved by Kaleidescape if the disc authors didn't encode those lines with "forced" subtitles coding.

I find the MovieGuide team pretty responsive and helpful on things like this... you may want to email them at movieguide-data@kaleidescape.com and let them know the disc UPC code and name and tell them exactly when the issue is happening, and see if you get a resolution on this.

--josh

 

[Prof Yaffle]

Jerry / Josh

Thanks for the welcome & the advice. I'm still working through the importing of my collection so will hold off following up on this with the Movie Guide team until I have a more complete picture.

As background, I'm coming to K from a self-maintained movie library - Dune players, shareware to rip discs then index the library, etc. I finally decided to go ahead with buying a K system as I found I was spending more time self-curating my library & less time actually enjoying it. One of the straws that broke the camel's back for me was the inability to get subtitles working properly on that platform.

The titles I've found to date that are problematic with the M700 player are a subset of those that I couldn't get working properly on my self-maintained library. They are typically DVDs with a few non-English lines of dialogue where the subtitles I want are based on a full subtitle stream (I think in the US this is termed Closed Captioned) - & where the relevant subset of these subtitles are flagged as 'forced'. There were a bunch of these DVDs I couldn't get to work automatically on my old system. The M700 player copes OK with some of these - but not all.

Interestingly, all the BluRays whose subtitles I struggled to get working well on the old platform are flawless on the Kaleidescape.

I'll post an update once I've reached out to the Movie Guide team about the problem DVDs & found out whether this is something that they can fix.

Rgds
Simon