Forced Subtitles

[Pauven]

With the final season of Game of Thrones just a few weeks away, I've been re-watching the entire series from the beginning.

As anyone who owns this series on Blu-ray can tell you, the menus are slow and obtrusive, with lots of un-skippable lead in video clips, and even worse lots of notifications/warnings video clips at the end of the last episode on each disc. As someone who just wants to watch the episodes, I feel punished for using the Blu-ray menus.

Fortunately, Chameleon MediaCenter supports direct episode playback (and with CMC v2.2, this is going to be so much better than ever before!). Simply select an episode, and it will directly play back from the ISO rip or Blu-ray Folder rip (which is superior, as it plays instantly without the slow ISO mounting process).

One thing I advertise about CMC is that you can use any external player for playback, and configure different players for different media types. For example, you could configure WMP to play DVDs, PowerDVD to play Blu-rays, VLC to play DVD Episodes, and MPC to play Blu-ray Episodes.

But why would you want to do that? Why not just a single player, the most bestest and perfectest player, for all media?

Simply put, there isn't one. They all have their strengths and weaknesses - and Game of Thrones exposes a major weakness with PowerDVD and VLC.

When you play Game of Thrones with PowerDVD with the Blu-ray menus, playing an episode you see the Forced Subtitles. What are Forced Subtitles? This is where only the foreign languages are subtitled. In Game of Thrones, this is critical for translating Dothraki to English.

But for some reason when you direct play a Blu-ray Episode with PowerDVD, not only do the Forced Subtitles not display, you don't get any subtitling options at all. PowerDVD is completely broken in this regard (I've tested with both PowerDVD 13 and 17).

What about VLC? In VLC, you can choose from all the different Subtitles (there are 12 on the Game of Thrones discs I have), but if you enable Subtitles then you see them for all dialog, not just the foreign language portions. It is missing the Forced Subtitles Only capability. There are open tickets on the VLC support page that extend back 12 years, so I have low hopes that this will be fixed anytime soon.

Luckily MPC-BE (Media Player Classic - Black Edition) has a solution. Not only does it provide for all 12 Subtitles (with language names, no less!), but has an option (Play > Subtitles > Advanced > Forced only) that makes the English Subtitles only display during the Dothraki and other foreign language scenes. Even better, I found I only had to enable this once, as the setting is saved and applies to future episodes.

Another great feature of MPC is that it will auto-close when the episode ends (assuming you wait through the credits), returning you to CMC, where you can select the next episode to play (and I am working on a Next Episode Auto-play feature too).

For this reason, I highly recommend MPC-BE for direct episode playback especially for series that have snippets of foreign language dialog that should be subtitled. I also recommend MPC-BE over MPC-HC, since HC hasn't been updated in over a year, and BE is still receiving frequent updates.

Paul