Bluray Subtitles Demystified – What settings to use in Handbrake
Bluray Subtitles behave differently to what we are used to in DVD’s. DVD subtitles are basically a text file with timings noted, and the specific text is displayed at the correct time. Bluray’s however use graphics that are pretty similar to PNG files. Each line of text is actually a little picture overlayed on top of the movie. Therefore, including subtitles in your Bluray encodes with Handbrake seems a bit tricky! However, in reality it’s actually easier than you think, let me show you how!
Once you have “Make” a MKV file from your source disk, there are two ways to go. We can either use the PGS subtitles from the disk in Handbrake directly, or we can convert the PGS subtitles to SRT text based subtitles. You are probably thinking “But won’t Handbrake burn the PGS subtitles in” and “I want to be able to turn them on and off”. And there is a very simple solution:
Want to Move Search Bar Back To The Top In Safari On iPhone?
For some reason in iOS 15 Apple decided to turn our world upside down, and put the Search Bar at the bottom of the window in the Safari web browser. To put it back to the top where it has always been open settings
Scroll down to Safari and open it up
Scroll down about halfway so you can see the “Tab Bar/Single Tab” option – Change this to “Single Tab” as shown below
Now close out of settings and go back into Safari, and your Search Bar is back where it belongs
I haven’t had a High Horse opinion on this site since 2011, but this change has really made me furious. I wish Apple would focus their attention on making what we have now work reliably, as opposed to changing things needlessly so they can announce it as a new feature at the next World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC).
From time to time you may find you need to know the frame numbers of individual frames in your videos and movies. This is especially useful if you are compressing and encoding video and want to be able to refer back to your source video and compare it to your encoded video. By picking a specific frame and knowing its number, you can view it from both versions side by side to see how it looks.
I recently stumbled upon DJV, a really useful and FREE program from Darby Johnston that amongst many other things, will allow you to see the frame numbers in videos. It has Windows, Mac and Linux versions, and can be downloaded free from the Darby Johnston Github Page HERE.
Once you have downloaded and installed DJV open it up, and you will see the main interface. Drag and Drop your video file onto DJV to load it.
To show the frame numbers we need to click the “View Menu” and select “HUD”, which is short for Heads Up Display.
Next, open the settings/preferences from the top right corner.
Then click and expand the “General” section, and in the “Time” option set the units to “Frames”
In the bottom left corner you will now see the frame numbers displayed.
Has Microsoft Office Excel ever confronted you with the error dialogue box that says “To do this, all the merged cells need to be the same size” when you are trying to sort your columns and data? It was driving me crazy, but a little dig into the documents settings revealed the culprit. To solve it just click the little triangle in the top left hand corner of your spreadsheet once to select the whole document.
Then right click on it to reveal some options and select “Format Cells”
This will open another menu with six tabs. Select the “Alignment” tab. Once selected, find the “Merge Cells” option.
Once you have found it, click it a few times until the box is empty.
Once the check box is empty, click “OK” and you are back in the game!
Have you ever had a large USB drive that only shows 200mb when you plug it into your Windows computer? Frustrating isn’t it!
And what makes it worse is that nothing you try in the “Format” utility will change it – it always says 200mb in the capacity drop down.
The reason this happens is that in some stage in the USB Drive’s life it has been plugged into a Mac, and it has done “Mac Things” to the drive. Thankfully, there is an easy way to fix it.
Like millions of other Apple/iPhone users around the world, I turned on Apple Music. Immediately, my whole music collection turned on its head. I had duplicate playlists, song files went missing and couldn’t be located, songs were renamed incorrectly, and music I had on my phone that is not in the Apple music library disappeared. Like most other musicians, I had a lot of music from my own bands there, and lots of music from fav’s who shunned the streaming service, like Prince. This music was ALL gone, and no matter what I tried to do, I just couldn’t get it back onto my iPhone. I tried to click the upload button next to affected tracks in iTunes to supposedly load them to iCloud, and it never worked. I could never get those tracks back onto my phone.
As time went on I grew to like the broad range of tunes available in Apple Music, and I came to accept that I just wasn’t going to have that old music on my phone anymore.
Over the weekend, I did a back up on my wife’s phone, and she asked for a specific playlist we have to be added. As she did not want to use Apple Music when it launched, I was able to click the playlist in iTunes, and sync her phone, and she had the music quickly and easily. It made me so angry that I decided enough was enough. I wanted control of my music back.
After lots of fruitless Googling, I was finally able to figure out what the issue is, and it is not Apple Music at all. It is “iCloud Music Library” that causes all of the problems. All Apple Music does is give you access to over a million songs, but iCloud Music Library tries match all of your music with songs in Apple’s collection, and then give you access to those tracks on your devices. In theory it sounds like a great idea, that should save drive space and give you high quality tunes. In the real world though, it is a poorly developed, rushed out, cacophony of errors that ruined my music collection. If you listen to mostly main stream music your issues might not be so bad, but if you have lots of live music, rare music, old vinyl you have converted yourself, or in the case of musicians your own original music, iCloud Music Library will mismatch, grey out, and in the some cases, remove music entirely from your device. And, no matter what you do, you will not be able to put it back.
**DISCLAIMER** – I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR MUSIC COLLECTION IF YOU DECIDED TO FOLLOW IN MY FOOTSTEPS! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK! THIS ARTICLE EXPLAINS HOW I GOT MY COLLECTION BACK TO WHERE I AM HAPPY WITH IT – THESE RESULTS MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOU.
In the end, it really only took one simple step to end this misery, regain control of what music is on my phone, and still have access to songs not in my collection via Apple Music.
I Turned off “iCloud Music Library” on my phone.
I went to settings and selected music:
Then I turned “iCloud Music Library” off, and got control of my Music Collection back!
Now, doing this is not without its perils, it turns your iPhone music collection on it’s head again, just like it did when Apple Music turned it on. A large majority of my music disappeared immediately, as it was matched (poorly) with music in Apple’s cloud. Thankfully, all of my original playlists before Apple Music were still on my Mac Pro, so when I did my first sync after flipping the switch, and I was able to select which music I wanted myself again, ALL of my music pre Apple Music was back! My 80’s Hairbands playlist went from 230 songs back up to its original 400. And lo and behold, the Gold Album was there as well.
The Down Side to switching off iCloud Music Library – All of the tunes I added to my iPhone collection from Apple Music had disappeared. Playlists containing Apple music disappeared. The ability to click the plus “+” button and save a song to my phone is no longer available. I can still search for and play any song on Apple Music, but I can’t add those songs to my device or use them in playlists, because Apple is a big whiny greedy baby!
Waaaaa – You cant save this song to your phone cos we want you to use
iCloud Music Library – Waaaaa-Ha-Haaaaa!!!! NEWSFLASH APPLE – Not everybody wants to sync their computer playlists to their iPhones and vice versa!
The bottom line is I now have control again, I have all of my favorite music back on my device, and I can control what is on there and what is not. I have lost a lot of functionality with Apple Music, and it is a small price to pay in my opinion, because I can still listen to those songs, and I finally have The Con!
Lionel Ritchie – Now a member of Warrant – Thanks Apple Music!
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