IfoEdit authoring with subtitles

[condor]

Recently I tried to backup 3 DVDs (movie only).

I demuxed the first angle of the main PGC of the DVDs (video, 1 audio and 1 subpicture stream) with VobEdit, recompressed the video stream with CCE and tried to author new DVDs with IfoEdit.

In all cases IfoEdit logged lots of 'data will arrive too late' messages for the subpicture stream and a 'buffer underrun detected'. ALL resulting DVDs didn't show subtitles !

I tried to do the same with DVD2DVD-R and the resulting DVDs DID show subtitles (but the subtitles were out of sync during the time the original DVDs had 2 angles).

Next, I compared the demuxed subpicture streams of VobEdit and DVD2DVD-R and noticed the both aren't raw subpicture streams (as generated by DVDDecrypter). Instead every frame is preceded by an 8 byte header.

Header bytes 4-7 seem to contain the time index (correct me if I am wrong) at which to show the subpicture frame. The subpicture stream generated by DVD2DVD-R contains a coninuously increasing time index, but the stream generated by VobEdit restarts at 0 at the layer break !

My questions:
- Is IfoEdit authoring wrong or do both VobEdit and DVD2DVD-R (only with multi-angle) create incorrect subtitle streams ?
- Is there a program that can demux subpicture streams that IfoEdit authoring CAN process without errors ?
- What is the layout of the 8 byte header of frames in a subpicture stream ?

Thanks, Condor

[maa]

Just an idea if you have enough HD space ;
Rip the whole movie with DVD-Decrypter and then use DVD Shrink to get what you want.
This way you have an un-altered copy of the IFOs for comparrison.

[condor]

I found some answers myself:

1. VOBEdit and DVD2DVR-R create .sup files with wrong time indexes.
2. First use VobSub to create .idx and .sub files, next use SubToSup to create .sup files. This also makes it possible to extract both widescreen and letterboxed subtitles !

Both VobSub and SubToSup can be found on the Doom9 download page.

[Kilgaard]

While waiting the manditory 5 days after signing up before being able to reply, I see you have found the easist way already.

VobEdit can be used, but only one VOBID at a time. It seems that most DVD9 movies have the two tracks in different VOBIDs. VobEdit (as you noticed) resets the timecode at the change in VOBID (which corresponds to the layer break). If you use IfoEdit to strip by VOBID you can rip the two layers into two separate VOB files, and then CCE them separately.

The problem with this (apart from being more work) is that you don't get full VBR sharing across the two halves of the movie. You may be able to rejoin the original .m2v files, CCE them, and then resplit them at the join point, but I haven't actually tried this.

DVD2DVD-R almost works, but doesn't quite get the timestamps at the VOBID change right, which results in the subs after the change being displayed early. You also say that it has trouble with multi-angle. I haven't tested in this area.