Subrip and DVDmaestro subtitles format

[Insolit]

First hi to all!

I'm having the following problem.

I want to extract the subs from a DVD with subrip, and put them in DVDmaestro format.
I want them cropped, and not a full size bitmap, so that they occupy less space.

The problem is that to make cropped bitmaps and have no overlay problems in DVDmaestro, i would have to proceed like i do in MaestroSBT, where I choose only one set of colors, and i get a white background which is exactly what i need.

This because, if using a cropped bitmap, DVDmaestro assumes the rest as white, so having a pallete that sets white as transparent, we get the correct overlay for our movie.

Subrip unfortunately does not seem to allow me this, dunno why, but i can't change the colors for dvdmaestro in subrip, is this a bug?

Is there any other way to do this, that would allow me to extract subs from DVD to cropped bitmaps, with a white background.

Hope someone understood my english :P

[McPoodle]

Is there any reason why you need to use a graphical format? Maestro can import three different types of subtitle files: CVC (extension .scr), Sonic (extension .son), and Spruce (extension .stl). The first two are graphic-based, while the third can be either text or graphic based. In SubRip, the graphic export format called "Spruce DVDMaestro" outputs the Sonic format, while the text export format called "Spruce subtitle" outputs the Spruce format. I've got the Spruce format documented at http://www.geocities.com/mcpoodle43/DVDMaestro/stl_format.html, in case you wanted to customize it after SubRip has created it.

[Insolit]

As long as a non-graphical format works as i want, i don't have problems using it.

But how can i create that .stl with subrip, extracting the subs from the DVD?

(thanks for your answer)

[Insolit]

From what i noticed to have that format, i must do OCR recognition, that is exactly what i want to avoid.

[Matthew]

OCR is horrible, of course you want to keep BMPs :)

When you say you want the subs to occupy less space you do mean on your HD right? Because full screen or cropped the size will be the same on the DVD (few megs for each stream).

Anyway, it's been a while since I've done it, but in the past I've used SubRip's cropped Maestro output and compiled DVDs with it. They turned out fine without any sort of extra fiddling being necessary.