Handbrake - Can't get it to work help please...!

[whyrichard]

Hello,

I am using handbrake on a new Mac mini. Both are up to date. I can't for the life of me get it to work properly!

I bought a set of DVD's from Amazon of a film that I am studying. I want to burn them to a digital file so that I can watch them on my phone and rewatch scenes easily There are two things that I can't get working properly:

1: Subtitles: It is a polish film with English subtitles. I select the Subtitles tab, and "0: English" in the Track. I select: FORCED ONLY, BURNED IN. And yet when the file is complete, it does not have any subtitles. I tried it at first on "DEFAULT" and the subtitles are only sometimes present.

2: There are blurred horizontal bars, especially when there is motion.

Is this some sort of constraint? I purchased the DVD's myself. This used to be easy with Handbrake, but I haven't used it in years. Is there an extra step in setting up Handbrake which I am missing?

Thanks,
R

 

[Nermal]

You probably don't want "forced only" turned on.

"Forced subtitles" are the ones where the DVD player will play them even when you've chosen not to. For example, in Lord of the Rings, the English subtitle track has most of the dialogue non-forced, but when the characters are speaking Elvish the subtitles still appear. The "forced only" feature is for that sort of thing, where you'd want to include the subtitles for the Elvish sections, but not throughout the rest of the movie.

 

[lin2log]

2: There are blurred horizontal bars, especially when there is motion.

That is what is called INTERLACING. A relic of the NTSC/PAL era. You could de-interlace, but that leads to reducing your vertical resolution by half since you can only remove every other line (or duplicate every other one, depending on how you look at it) to get rid of it. Or you use very expensive soft or hardware.

 

[BrianBaughn]

To me it seems hard to diagnose without seeing it. You could upload a few seconds for folks to examine.

I'm wondering if it's possible that some copy protection on the DVD is causing issues…as it's designed to do.

An app a lot of folks have used (in the past) to rip DVDs is MakeMKV.

MakeMKV - Download

MakeMKV - software to convert blu-ray and dvd to mkv

www.makemkv.com

Be sure to notice the "This version is too old" information on that page. Also, you make have to run a terminal command on the app to get past MacOS Gatekeeper. If you want to try that just ask here for help.