Converting a blu-ray to DCP issue - DCP-o-Matic

[Mike Blakesley]

We have a private show scheduled for tomorrow morning. The customer brought in his own Blu-Ray of "The Shining," which as far as I can tell is a regular American pressing. (There is no package with it, just the disk itself.) I converted the movie to DCP last week using the same methods I've done the last 75 or 100 conversions. I used MakeMKV to rip the file, and ran it through DCP-o-Matic the same way as always. Went to test it out a couple of days ago and the soundtrack has a French (or maybe Spanish, I can't quite tell) soundtrack overlaid on it. I didn't change any of the settings in any of the programs along the way.

I figured maybe I had screwed something up without realizing it, so I started completely from scratch last night with a new conversion. Just tried that one out and it came out the same way.

Here is a picture of the disc contents as shown on MakeMKV; does anyone have any ideas of what I'm missing or doing wrong here?

IMG_3319.jpg

[Brad Miller]

The super easy answer is to un-check all language tracks except the 5.1 English when you rip it.

[Carsten Kurz]

You created an MKV file that contains multiple audio streams for different languages. You can use it in DCP-o-matic, but you need to select the proper stream in the audio matrix. Per default, DCP-o-matic uses the first stream. You may, as Brad recommends, only rip one audio stream - but have to make sure it's the proper one, and MakeMKV does not allow to listen to the track you select (DCP-o-matic does).
You could also open the MKV in VLC and switch between languages to check them. There may be multiple english streams, these could just be different channel/codecs (like 2ch/DolbySurround vs. 5.1 DTS HD), but one could also carry an additional audio commentary. Make sure you select the right one before you start the conversion. Having multiple audio streams in an MKV will also slow down the content/audio analysis in DCP-o-matic . Better discard any foreign tracks you won't use. Also, you can actually set MKV to always preselect e.g. only English audio tracks and subtitles when opening the disc.

[Leo Enticknap]

I haven't used MakeMKV for this purpose, and have always used DVDFab. But the principle is the same - rip the language track that you need, and none of the others.

What can make this difficult is if the different language tracks weren't correctly tagged in the DVD or BD authoring process. I once had to rip a BD of the Nazi Titanic to DCP for a screening, and discovered the hard way that none of the three or four audio tracks were tagged with their language. On the first attempt I ended up with an "expert" commentary of some professor pontificating about the movie, and the second, a Spanish dub. It took me half a dozen attempts to get the original German audio with English subtitles off the disc.

Another gotcha to note is that if the movie's audio is mono, the chances are high that on the DVD or BD, it will be duplicated on L and R, which is the absolute last thing you want for theatrical presentation, because anyone sitting not along the centerline of the house will likely hear a nasty echo effect. In DCP-o-Matic, you can resolve this by sending both the left and right tracks to center, attenuating both by 6dB in the process.

[Mike Blakesley]

Well the odd thing is, my usual procedure is, when I load the disk into MakeMKV, it pre-selects everything. I right click on the list and select "unselect all." Then I just select the movie file and make my MKV... I never even open the long listing pictured, normally. It's always worked fine to this point.

I do think I had MakeMKV set up to choose English automatically, it's been too long and I don't really remember setting it up, but I would have picked that feature, I'd think.

Kind of a moot point though at this point, there's not enough time now to try it again because the show is tomorrow. I have already informed the customer of the issue and he's fine with just using the blu-ray itself. But I'll definitely try it again afterward just to make sure I'm not going crazy.

[Carsten Kurz]

Well, it's not impossible to use a multi-stream MKV in DCP-o-matic - as DCP-o-matic allows to monitor audio, you just need to select the right stream/channels and make sure you don't end up with one that carries a commentary as well. For this, it is usually a good idea to play the MKV in VLC and switch between audio streams somewhere mid-feature. That will tell you what's in the file. Also - if you still have the project and files that resulted in the spanish version - you can just reopen it, switch to the proper english stream, and start a new conversion. That will go pretty fast, as DCP-o-matic will not again go through the video compression. I will just rewrap english audio and reuse the existing video conversion. But that only works if you didn't delete the whole project/folder in the meantime.

[Ioannis Syrogiannis]

I would advise using only one audio stream, as I had sync issues in the past. +1
mkvtoolnix GUI is a good and fast way to re-mux.
I would also try to use only the audio and make a VF with it, to save transcoding time, once I made sure frame conversion would be proper.

[Steve Wilson]

I had a problem with a disk a few weeks back. it had no English Track. Had every other track known to man, but no English.