How to disable Forced Subtitles?

[ZoSTeR]

Hi!

It seems to become a bad habit to enforce subtitles when watching a DVD with the original soundtrack. The only way around it that I found is to rip and remultiplex the DVD.
Are there any other solutions you know of? (either for software DVD players or the Hollywood+)
If got a mail from Oliver Kastl (the author of RegionKiller and CloneCD) and he told me he's trying to find a way to disable them on the fly but he isn't sure if it's possible.

GreetZ
ZoSTeR

[Doom9]

it is in fact possible. There's several stores offering to make such modifications to your standalone dvd player. Media Markt even had a DVD Player (SMC DVD-330) 2 years ago which was region free and had no user option disables (that's the technical term for such user inhibitions like makeing subs non selectable or non disable-able). However, on a software level I'd guess it's very hard. You'd have to have access tot he souces and simply not implement this "feature". But.. region killer actually manages to trick the player into believing another region.. so who knows.. maybe somebody can come up with something.. but atm there's no solution.

[ProfDrMorph]

There's a player called Hero 2000 or something like that which is able to play DVDs and let's you move the subtitles. You can just move it "below" the picture so that it becomes "invisible" ;). Newer versions also allow you to completly disable subtitles from what I heard.

You can download it from http://www.herosoft.com/. But the site is in chinese I think. At least it was when I last time looked at it. But it's possible to find the player by looking at the URLs of the links on the page. Somewhere there's a link to a download page and there are links to files like "setup2000.zip" or "herosetup.zip". I would search that link for you but at the moment I've got problems with my ISP and so my browser won't load the website. It even has problems with www.doom9.org and this forum. This sucks! It took me nearly 2 hours to download GKnot 0.20.1 with my 768 kbit/s ADSL connection.

#EDIT:
My browser finally loaded the page. Here are the links I talked about:
http://www.herosoft.com/down/down_file/Demo.zip <- this MAY be the player
http://ftp.eware.com.cn/pub/multimedia/video/herosoft2001.zip <- this looks like a newer version of the player

And these are some older files. I'm sure that at least one of it contains the player but in an older version:
http://www.herosoft.com/down/down_file/SETUP2000.zip
http://www.herosoft.com/down/down_file/DVDEMO.zip

I'm currently downloading the first two files but they take me nearly 4 hours for downloading. Have I mentioned that my ISP sucks? ;)

[Doom9]

hmm.. I remember hero2000.. sucky as hell

[ProfDrMorph]

Even though other DVD players are better I think nearly no other DVD player will allow you to disable forced subtitles since I think this is a violation to the DVD specs.

[ZoSTeR]

After nearly buying an UOP-free player i finally was successful with my stand-alone player and eugene's h+ player.

Settings for eugene's player (don't know if i did anything else):
Language: none, Subtitles: none, Region Check: disabled

For my standalone player (Grundig 110/ Philips 710):
Start the movie with the desired language.
Press Stop, enter player setup, change subtitle language to none or something unavailable like chinese.
Leave setup
Press Play or press Menu and choose Resume Film

This seem to work with many other standalone players.

[Cradle22]

It is also possible with ZoomPlayer 2.21. But you have to understand how the enabling/disabling and connecting of filters work and write your own scripts...
I'm fiddling with it since yesterday, and I can disable the subtitles, but then some discs won't play at all (Tomb Raider), neither in Zoomplayer, nor in WinDVD, and I have to reinstall WinDVD AND my soundcard drivers...

But if I find a convenient way (i.e. usable filter scripts), I will post it here...