Subtitle Creator - out of sync subs and artifacts

[kweldood]

I love the practical side of using Subtitle Creator's wizard to easily add my own subs to a DVD, but it'll often end up with corrupted results. The problem seems to happen when saving a .sup from a .srt , and comes in two forms:

Sometimes the subs lose their original sync when converting them to .sup with Subtitle Creator from the original .srt - I found no plausible explanation of why this happens, especially because when it does, I'll typically just uninstall and reinstall the program and it then works fine... without me selecting any options on it in the meanwhile!

As for the artifacts, they come as small lines and bits under the subs. I often get around them by trying out with different fonts, sizes and screen positions before repeating the conversion to .sup . Again this behaviour seems random, and I can't seem to pinpoint a reason or a definitive way to get rid of it.

If someone knows about this and can help, I would appreciate it a lot.

[kweldood]

What, you're going to tell me I'm the only person in the planet facing this ? :p

What are you people using to sync and add your own subs to DVDs these days then ?

[therealjoeblow]

I love the practical side of using Subtitle Creator's wizard to easily add my own subs to a DVD, but it'll often end up with corrupted results. The problem seems to happen when saving a .sup from a .srt , and comes in two forms:

Sometimes the subs lose their original sync when converting them to .sup with Subtitle Creator from the original .srt - I found no plausible explanation of why this happens, especially because when it does, I'll typically just uninstall and reinstall the program and it then works fine... without me selecting any options on it in the meanwhile!

As for the artifacts, they come as small lines and bits under the subs. I often get around them by trying out with different fonts, sizes and screen positions before repeating the conversion to .sup . Again this behaviour seems random, and I can't seem to pinpoint a reason or a definitive way to get rid of it.

If someone knows about this and can help, I would appreciate it a lot.


I see exactly the same thing if I use Tahoma 18 point regular, and sometimes with Arial Narrow 18 point too - line artifacts under the subs, but it only appears if I use the PowerDVD decoders (v-8 or 9, doesn't make a difference). With FFdhow or Nvidia/Theatertek decoders, the artifacts don't appear.

Nevertheless, I didn't like the artifacts being there - I found it could be eliminated by moving the subs up or down a bit, so it's probably a program calculation error where the background mask position isn't perfectly aligned with the rest of the sub picture at certain vertical offsets with certain font heights.

Another thing I didn't like is that the subs created by Subtitle Creator just don't look that good, there's too much blurring and edge fuzziness with the rendered sub pics.

So now I use DVD Subtitle Tools v-1.6 (2004-03-07) to create my .SUP file, it creates much cleaner looking rendered images; and then use Subtitle Creator to change colors, position, and remaster the DVD. With the .SUP from DVD Subtitle Tools, I don't get any of the artifacts anymore, the subs are *infinitely* more readable (especially at smaller font sizes, which I prefer on my 50" plasma TV), and I only have to remaster the disc once, not play hit and miss.

[kweldood]

Thanks for the tip Joe, I'll try SubtitleTools.

Figuring that the problem does reside in the conversion to .sup , I had already tried Txt2sup but it also mis-timed the subtitles (the name of Subtitle Creator's author is mentioned in Txt2sup, leading me to believe that both programs use the same broken code that cause the problem).