EDIT: Oh my god, sorry, I’m an idiot who forgot that the Jellyfin subtitles setting menu had a save button you needed to press. ALSO, Simultaneously, I posted this earlier than I intended; I thought to myself “OK I’ll try this one last thing and if that doesn’t work then I’ll give up and ask for help”, and then went and wrote this post while I waited for the DVD to rip - and then I went and posted it as soon as I was done writing, without waiting for the one last attempt to finish. It turns out that removing the –subtitle scan flag fixes the problem. So I double shouldn’t have posted this. Sorry for taking up your time, I saw an option to hide this post so I think I’ll be doing that now.

First, this doesn’t seem like quite the right community to post this in, but I couldn’t find a better fitting one on Lemmy, and I’d prefer not to dust off my Reddit account if I don’t have to. If you know of somewhere better for me to post this please let me know

I’m trying to use Automatic Ripping Machine (ARM) to copy my DVD collection onto my home server for playback with Jellyfin. I want the subtitles on the Jellyfin versions of my shows to work the same as playing the DVDs on my blu-ray player: Off by default, available when desired. After some googling I found that in order to have the subtitles on the disc to be retained in the files output by ARM (and thus be displayable in Jellyfin) I needed to put the –all-subtitles flag in the HB_ARGS_DVD section of the config file, so that it’d be passed to HandBrakeCLI in the transcoding stage. That worked, the subtitle selector appeared in Jellyfin and had all the options as the DVD does in my blu-ray player, but it introduced a new problem: The first subtitle track gets incorrectly marked as “Forced”, and is selected by default in Jellyfin even when I set my Jellyfin user’s subtitle settings to “None”.

I have tried and tried and tried but no search term I’ve come up with has found me somebody who had this same problem. I found that the -F option that was included in HB_ARGS_DVD by default is short for –subtitle-forced, which marks the first subtitle track as forced when given without an argument, but removing the -F from the config file and recreating the ARM docker container did nothing to fix the issue. Replacing the -F with –subtitle-forced=‘none’ or –subtitle-forced=none also didn’t work, and neither did adding –subtitle-default=none or –subtitle-default=‘none’

My current setting for HB_ARGS_DVD is –subtitle scan --all-subtitles --subtitle-burned=none --subtitle-default=none, which still has the issue. The only lead I have left is to use an external program called “MKVToolNix” to manually set the subtitle track as not forced for every single video file, but

1. I’d rather fix the tool I’m already using than add an extra step to the DVD ripping process if possible
2. I tried using MKVToolNix earlier and couldn’t get it to do what I wanted

A way to make Jellyfin disregard the “Forced” flag and treat the subtitle track normally would also work in my case but that seems less likely to exist than a way to fix HandBrake.

#selfhosted