One of the nice things about DVDs are the extras, such as “Commentary” tracks where people involved with the production (such as the director, actors, etc) will tell you about the movie, tv, show, etc.

But how do you get that if you want to convert them into an AppleTV compatible format?

The answer is easy. And complicated.

In it’s simplest form, the answer is this:

1. Open HandBrake, select the “Source” you want to use. (In this case I’m using one of the DVDs from the West Wing series.)

2. Click on the “Audio & Subtitles” tab (shown in blue below).

3. Click “Track 1” and look at the drop-down options:

1. The West Wing DVDs are marked as having “Director’s Commentary” but other DVDs I’ve seen have no such clear indicator. You might simply have to look for a second track marked ‘English’

2. [Optional] I recommend setting the “Subtitles” to “English” (and leave “Forced Subtitles Only” unchecked) in case you want to be able to follow along with the movie/show. Most often the commentary track will drown out the regular audio. If it is a movie/show that you know well enough to not need the original script, well then I suppose you can leave it off.

Note: Subtitles are an all-or-nothing proposition. Neither QuickTime nor VLC has any way to turn them on/off. You either embed them into the video file when you rip from DVD, or you don’t.

There is supposed to be support for turning subtitles/captioning on/off, but so far there is no way to do it, at least as far as I am aware.

“Well that sounds easy enough…”

Like most other things, there is a catch.

Did you notice that there are dropdown boxes for more than one track?

Did you wonder what those other tracks are used for?

If you use the instructions I gave you above, you will be left with an output file which will default to giving you the director’s commentary and an alternate audio track which has the original audio in it.

So what’s the problem?

Well, for Mac users, the problem is that Apple doesn’t do a great job supporting alternate tracks.

For example, in my testing, VLC let me switch between the commentary track and regular track.

Go to the “Audio” menu then go to the “Audio Track” sub-menu and choose there.

Works great.

Quicktime

Quicktime, on the other hand… Well…. not so much.

There’s a similar menu option.

Confusingly, you’ll need to choose the “View” menu option, then “Languages” (“View Languages”? and you’ll see something like this:

Unfortunately for me, it has never once worked for me.

Neither will it work in FrontRow. There is nowhere to change the audio.

Supposedly AppleTV 2.2 supports alternate audio but HandBrake users report some problems with it and I have not tested it myself.

iTunes does support alternate audio, and rather well, either from the menu Controls : Audio & Subtitles as shown here:

It’s not actually showing it as “Director’s Commentary” but you get the idea.

You can also do it from the pop-up menu which appears when you move the mouse over a playing video. Simple click on the little “Talk Bubble” (it looks like a Q with a very small “foot”) and a pop-up menu will appear to choose the audio:

As far as I know there are no options for controlling audio from the iPhone.

“So what should I do?”

My opinion? Rip it twice.

Rip it once “normally” and a second time do as I have shown above.

You tell HandBrake to add the same item to its queue twice with different settings (just be sure to rename the output file).

When you add the metadata, put the word “Commentary” in it somewhere where it will be easily identified (i.e. in the Episode Title. For example, this episode of the West Wing is called “Twenty Five”. When I apply metadata to it, I will call it “Twenty Five [with commentary and subtitles]” which will make it easy to spot later on.

Given that subtitles are an on-or-off encoding option and not something you can switch on/off from a menu item, it seems like another good reason to make a second copy.

Yes, this means that it will take twice as long, but if you leave it running overnight, both of them ought to be finished by morning (assuming you have a fairly recent computer).

N.B. Sometimes Commentary Tracks Are On Different ‘Titles’

I have heard that there are some DVDs where the commentary track is a completely separate “Title” in HandBrake.

By “Title” I mean where HandBrake shows “2 - 00h42m13s” here:

For example, if you were ripping a movie which was 02h21m15s long, you might see two Titles which were about that same length.

If that is the case, one of those might be the commentary track, or it might be a “dummy” Title put in when the DVD was mastered to try to confuse those who try to convert DVDs to other formats.

Sadly, given the Movie Studios ongoing attempts to prevent you from doing things like make iPhone/AppleTV compatible versions of the DVDs that you own, it can be very difficult to know what you are getting on some DVDs.

If you are not sure what to do, I highly recommend ripping only one “Chapter”.

Again, look at the image above. See the dropdowns for Chapters 1 through 7? If you want to test what is happening, tell HandBrake to rip Chapter 1 through Chapter 1 and open the resultant file to check the results. It will take a lot less time and might save you a bit of frustration.

I hope that helps.