Video file queries - audio description

[Dave2002]

We sometimes take files from our PVR to watch on computers or on mobile devices. These are usually .ts files which can be viewed with players such as VLC, or converted to mp4 for use with other players.

Some files seem to have additional tracks - which I think are probably (a) audio describe tracks (b) text description tracks - and in some players these are activated on playback. So far the only way I've found to remove the unwanted audio and/or text description is to re-encode the files using Handbrake to produce an mp4 file. However, this does strike me as a sledgehammer to crack a nut approach. Don't any video players have settings to switch off audio desription and/or text (translation?) subtitles? If so it would be easier to find the controls and turn off unwanted features, rather than having to re-encode/transcode the video to strip out the unwanted components in the container file.

Handbrake is good, and the resulting files are good quality about and probably 1/4 or 1/3 the original file size, but does take a while to do the processing. The reduction in file size is helpful for use with iPads etc. which may have limited storage.

Any help with this would be appreciated.

[Dave2002]

Got a fix now with VLC. There appear to be two methods for VLC - I've only tried one so far.

Method 1 - Temporary:

Open the video file in VLC. Start it running. Don't open full screen yet. Select the Audio tab at the top, and there may be several checked options, such as
Disable, Track 1 (NAR), Track 2(English) and maybe more if there are foreign language tracks. The track with audio description is probably the NAR one, which might be checked/ticked already. Select the Track 2 option instead, and the unwanted narration will be suppressed.

If unwanted subtitles appear they can also be suppressed by selecting the Subtitles menu and the sub menu options within that.

Method 2.

This may only work for unwanted subtitles. Open VLC -> Preferences and do appropriate changes there. However, although I can see change options for captions, I can't see any way right now to control the audio narration track.

If anyone else can figure this, then please post here.

I'm still assuming that VLC is the only video player with this degree of flexibility. Others such as MPlayer or MPlayerX work fine with basic video files, but may not work in a controllable fashion with video files with option possibilities - such as captions or additional narration tracks.

The VLC options approach avoids the "need" to recode the video file, though some may still want to do that for other reasons, such as reducing the file size, for example for use with iPads or smart phones.