SubtitleCreator (alternative to srt2sup)

[Paddington]

Updated 13-06-2005
I have been adding subtitles to DVDs for some time now, but converting srt files to sup files was a bit inconvenient wrt the subtitle colors. Although srt2sup created another tool, SupRemap, to solve this problem, I found that it took to much time and as I wanted to try C#, I wrote a program myself, SubtitleCreator (https://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/), that does what srt2sup can do, and much more:

Read the original color palette from the IFO file, and you can select the colors you want to use
Determines PAL/NTSC video format
Use italics/bold/underline, in SubRip's and MicroDVD format
Use Larger/large/small fonts
Align text to the left/right/center
Basic synchronization using time shifting or frame rate conversion
Advanced synchronization by synchronizing with an original SUP file
Join multiple subtitle files, e.g. if the downloaded subtitle file is split in two parts.
It's much faster
Preview DVD + synchronization with DVD
Manipulate existing SUPs (remapping of colors, or repositioning vertically)
Stretch subtitles vertically or horizontally
Edit subtitles
Delete, insert and split subtitles
Search subtitles
Use a special algorithm for rendering Persian fonts, or other fonts where the characters are connected.
The subtitles are now automatically checked if they are too long. You can jump to the next too long subtitle using CTRL-N (can be turned off in the settings menu)
By default, subtitles with @ or HTTP etc are being unchecked, which can be turned of in the settings menu (can also be turned of in the settings menu)
By default, I turn on anti-aliasing to make the display look nicer, but this can be turned of in the settings menu, allowing you to see the actual output.
Auto-adjust SUP position (automatically position the SUP in the currently selected subtitle text area) to the tools menu.
Added (un-)select all subtitles to the listView's context menu.
Added remove line breaks to the listView's context menu.
Added a new (requested) aspect ratio of 2.21:1.
Added search function to the Manipulate SUP window.

http://img48.echo.cx/img48/523/mainwindow8gv.jpg (http://www.imageshack.us)
Similar to srt2sup, you can also:

Position subtitles
Position the subtitles using a screenshot of your movie
Deselect certain subtitles


Additionally, the zip file contains an updated version of my guide, explaining in detail using screenshots what you need to do to add a subtitle to a DVD.

HOWEVER, PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU ALSO NEED TO HAVE THE .NET FRAMEWORK (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=262D25E3-F589-4842-8157-034D1E7CF3A3&displaylang=en) INSTALLED!!!

Please, try it out and let me know what you think of it.

Finally, in the thread will you find people mentioning bugs that have already been solved.

[castellanos]

Nice!!!! What did you do about the subtitle quality? Do they look the same like Srt2Sup or better?
Greetings! :)

[Paddington]

Quality is about the same, unfortunately - there is not much that you can do with the quality, as you only have four colors to create them, so anti-aliasing options are limited.

[castellanos]

Well... colors are just fine, I can't complain, but what about the text quality? because in Srt2Sup are good, but not so well round formed ,as for instance, VobSub.

[itoinbg]

I tried to open your program, but there was an error mesage displayed.I dont know do I have .NET Framework installed.Where to find it?

[niamh]

On the big red .NET FRAMEWORK link in the first post..

[mafe]

i had a problem, i used your nice program and im experiencing this:

http://www.bonustrack.net/22.png

thats lines... i dont know which software added it...

subtitle creator or ifoedit.

someone can help me please?

sorry for my bad english...

[Triple-z]

thanks for this nice program.

i got some problems with it too:

1. i get the subtitle with some gray background and not transperent (i did mark it as black transperent background). how can i fix it? i try to fix it a few times and still got this background..

2. its NTSC dvd, and i want the subtitles to be lower than the picture, in the black area. is it possible?

thanks! :)

[Paddington]

Some answers

With respect to the picture showing the uggly lines - I think that might be my fault. I will check the code, but it might be that I don't clean the bitmap (where I draw the text) completely, so there are still some leftovers from the previous subtitle... I will check...

About the question regarding the text quality: I use the standard graphical functions of the operating system to write the subtitle text to a bitmap, and convert the bitmap to a sup file. Improving the text quality is therefore the best you can get using the PAL/NTSC resolution (without writing my own text plotting function). If you are not satisfied, try using a different font...

About transparency problems: I am surprised to hear about that one. The only thing you might check is to make sure that you don't use the dark gray (=default) background color for something else. I haven't tested that, but there seems to be a limitation if you use one color twice, and one of them should be transparent.
Another difficulty might be with NTSC - IfoEdit has some problems with it, so you might give ReJig a try.

About positioning in the black area: I suppose that should be possible. Make a screenshot of your DVD and use this as the background image. Next, position the subtitles in the black area where you want them.

[lawesly]

Hi, Paddington
Your new subtitle tool is very good, can you Open Source for your subtitlecreator?
Thanks.

[crashi]

Originally posted by mafe
i had a problem, i used your nice program and im experiencing this:

thats lines... i dont know which software added it...

subtitle creator or ifoedit.

someone can help me please?

sorry for my bad english...

Same problems here.

[Paddington]

As I don't have a lot of time to change/maintain the source code, I will consider open sourcing it if the interest is sufficient. I will have to look at SourceForge how to do that, though... Any suggestions?

[lawesly]

that'll have a great help to all!

Originally posted by Paddington
As I don't have a lot of time to change/maintain the source code, I will consider open sourcing it if the interest is sufficient. I will have to look at SourceForge how to do that, though... Any suggestions?

[TomSem]

already done some movies with this great app but still having problems with the lines at the bottom

[finiteyoda]

Hi, just tried the program to make my first DVD! I think it definitely saves a lot of time vs. sup2srt. Here were a few things I noticed:

1) Yah, I got those creepy lines along the bottom of the subtitles too.
2) Lines that are in italics, aren't centered, they're left-justified.
3) I used SUPremap to change the colors in the SUP file created by SubtitleCreator... oddly, though, while I set the outlines to be black and the text to be white, when I opened the DVD it was the reverse. I fixed the problem by swapping the colors in the IFO, so I wouldn't have to remultiplex, but I was wondering if the source of the confusion was your program or SUPremap's?
4) No vertical alignment... I noticed this in SRT2SUP as well, and it slightly annoys me... On a lot of DVD's I notice that subtitles have bottom vertical alignment, so if you have a single line of text, it's located where the 2nd line of text would normally be (rather than in the middle). This keeps shorter subtitles out of the way more, by having them closer to bottom. It'd be nice to have a way to control this.
5) I couldn't tell if the vertical position controls worked or not... in the Preview, the vertical position is always reset, no matter how many times I set it.
6) There seems no way to control the color of subtitles. For instance, one project I'm working on, song lyrics are in yellow, and regular subtitles are in white. It'd be cool to have a way to set the colors. I know SubRip supports a <font color> tag, but Subtitle Workshop can't seem to interpret it... and I'm guessing SubtitleCreator can't as of now either?

Other than that, a fabulous program! I was also really amazed at how much faster it is than SRT2SUP (seemed about 10 times faster?). If you make this open source, I'd be interested in helping out too. I have a lot of experience programming in Visual C++. If you need help moving your project to SourceForge, I could help out with that too. Shoot me a pm if you're interested.

Keep up the good work!
Jason

[Paddington]

Here a quick reply...

1) Still on my list...
2) Indeed, lines in italic (bold, or underlined for that matter) are not centered. The reason being that it is quite difficult and inaccurate to measure the length of an italic string, and determine the correct position.
3) I wouldn't know where it goes wrong. I always use the original IFO file, and select from the colors that go with it.
4) I actually never noticed - that shouldn't take too long to include as a new feature.
5) It does work - but I never bothered to use the new settings. I normally take a screenshot using Nero Showview, open it in the preview window, position the subtitle box where I want it, and then never check again.
6) I never had this requirement - I am also familiar with some subtitles for the hearing impaired using two colors to denote the different speakers, but the main problem is that most subtitles you can download don't use color tags. And I am just too lazy to do it by hand myself...

The main speed advantage is, I think, because I don't scroll all the commands in the bottom window, and I have no preview enabled by default, which really slows things down....

Like written in a pm, I would appreciate your help in setting up a sourceforge project.

[finiteyoda]

Ah, one other thing before I forget, I also noticed different results when reading IFO subpicture palettes using SUPremap and SubtitleCreator. At least, when I opened an IFO using SUPremap, I got a pretty basic 16-color palette (pretty much all the basic colors, and a grayscale)... opening up the same IFO in SubtitleCreator, everything was dark red, except for the last 4 colors (the grayscale) which came out OK... I"m not totally sure what the problem here is, but thought I'd mention it before I forgot.

Besides that, regarding SourceForge, you've got a pm!

[lawesly]

Hi,Paddington,
You can goto sourceforge.net website and create a new user account at "my sf.net" link page, then enter https://sourceforge.net/register/ to registering a new Project for your Great new subtitle tool - SubtitleCreator!
Enjoy please!

[kitsaros2000]

Thx to Paddington i made also a tool that generates only sup from a txt file . I was trying before Paddington had made this tool but i couldnt find any conclusion ... (im a crappuy programmer lets face it).
Mine is wrotten in delphi6 and doesnt need the .net framework since Paddington made this thread i dont want to advertize my tool but if someone wants it just pm me . I made this post because mine SEEMS to not add these lines at the bottom .

Bye and thx again Paddington ! :)

[Paddington]

Just to let you know, I have requested an open source project at sourceforce, but it will take up to two days before they will inspect my request. So hopefully, you should have the sources available pretty soon, and you can help remove these damn lines (which I actually don't see myself :-)

[TomSem]

Hi paddington,

you can see the line if you choose font arial narrow , regular , size 22. I figure out the lines depends on the font.
Tell me what font u use so i can get rid of those lines also :D

[finiteyoda]

I don't think it matters which font you use... I tried using Verdana, and I get the same results. Once the source is available, I'm going to try and fix the problems related to the lines at the bottom, as well as hopefully improve the level of text rendering to match other tools like DVDMaestro (haha, if anyone wants to donate a copy to me :) Otherwise I'll just do my best to figure out what it should be like!)

[lawesly]

Hi paddington,
I can see the project at sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator), but there're nothing now, why ?!:confused:

[finiteyoda]

I think he's busy working on uploading the code ;p Once the code and executables are uploaded, I'm going to try and fill out the project pages a little.

[Paddington]

Finiteyoda is right - I have updated my code a bit, and fixed some bugs, e.g.
- The lines underneath the subtitles is fixed (I think - I don't see them, anyways)
- I know read the right IFO colours
- Lines are placed at the bottom of the subtitle window
- Preview window retains most information between open/close

Additionally, I created two new features: you now see how the subtitle will look like (except for the size) after reading the IFO file, so you know if you have to change something.

Second, you can read basic *.sub files (although this still needs to be improved. Some sub files contain strings like {Y:i}... does anybody know what this means? Italics???

Using Finiteyoda's suggestions, I will upload the latest version to the sourceforge project asap, probably at the end of this week.

[Paddington]

OK, it has taken me some time, but I've finally found some room in my schedule to fix a couple of bugs, such as the stupid lines in the subtitles. Additionally, synchronizing with other sup subtitles works better than ever, and some other bugs have been fixed as well. You can download the latest version from the same site as above:

http://home.hetnet.nl/~erikvullings/subtitlecreator_v1_0.zip

I'm sure that there are still some bugs in it, so let me know, and I will try to fix them.

Additionally, Finiteyoda is very busy, so the sourceforge project is not really going very fast...

[finiteyoda]

hehe... yes, i'll echo that i am very busy right now (it's my midterms week) but i should be able to post the source to cvs and work on it some by the end of this week :D 'k, gotta run to class now before i'm late!!

[Paddington]

Here's another update - I've added my C# sources to SourceForge (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/subtitlecreator/), and you can now download them and compile the program using MS Visual Studio.

Even easier, you can get the latest version in the release (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/subtitlecreator/SubtitleCreator/bin/Release) directory. Make sure that you get everything in there (so the executable and the two pictures - the example directory is optional, but show you some of the new features using underlines, italics and bold, and that you can read srt as well as sub now).

If you are interested in the documentation (http://home.hetnet.nl/~erikvullings/), I will try to upload this as well, but in the mean time, follow the previous link. There, you will also find a link to the latest stable (http://home.hetnet.nl/~erikvullings/subtitlecreator_v1_0.zip) version, although I am not going to maintain this one...

[Paddington]

And here you can find the latest release of SubtitleCreator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/).

[finiteyoda]

haha, i've tried uploading a c++ version as well, but no luck it seems? maybe i'm just doing something wrong. in any case, i will try to work on getting a working, compilable c++ version of the code uploaded as well, for those of us without vs .net.

[mafe]

See the end of this message for details on invoking
just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box.

************** Exception Text **************
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at SubtitleCreator.SUP.WriteSup(FileStream fs, Bitmap b, Int32 StartTime, Int32 Duration, RectangleF subWndw)
at SubtitleCreator.Subtitles.ProcessSubtitles(ProgressBar myProgressBar)
at SubtitleCreator.MainForm.IDButtonStart_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mevent)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)


************** Loaded Assemblies **************
mscorlib
Assembly Version: 1.0.5000.0
Win32 Version: 1.1.4322.2032
CodeBase: file:///c:/winxp/microsoft.net/framework/v1.1.4322/mscorlib.dll
----------------------------------------
SubtitleCreator
Assembly Version: 0.0.0.0
Win32 Version: 0.0.0.0
CodeBase: file:///C:/Varios/subtitlecreator_v1_0/SubtitleCreator.exe
----------------------------------------
System.Windows.Forms
Assembly Version: 1.0.5000.0
Win32 Version: 1.1.4322.2032
CodeBase: file:///c:/winxp/assembly/gac/system.windows.forms/1.0.5000.0__b77a5c561934e089/system.windows.forms.dll
----------------------------------------
System
Assembly Version: 1.0.5000.0
Win32 Version: 1.1.4322.2032
CodeBase: file:///c:/winxp/assembly/gac/system/1.0.5000.0__b77a5c561934e089/system.dll
----------------------------------------
System.Drawing
Assembly Version: 1.0.5000.0
Win32 Version: 1.1.4322.2032
CodeBase: file:///c:/winxp/assembly/gac/system.drawing/1.0.5000.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/system.drawing.dll
----------------------------------------

************** JIT Debugging **************
To enable just in time (JIT) debugging, the config file for this
application or machine (machine.config) must have the
jitDebugging value set in the system.windows.forms section.
The application must also be compiled with debugging
enabled.

For example:

<configuration>
<system.windows.forms jitDebugging="true" />
</configuration>

When JIT debugging is enabled, any unhandled exception
will be sent to the JIT debugger registered on the machine
rather than being handled by this dialog.

i have winxp sp2 with the last .net framework 1.1 with the last sp

[finiteyoda]

I'm not sure I understand... are you saying you ran into a bug, or are you just giving advice on debugging the program? I don't use .net myself, personally, so maybe that's why your post doesn't quite make sense to me...

[mafe]

sorry :mad: when i click in START that error appears. And the .sup is not generated.

[Paddington]

Mafe, thanks for telling me - this is my first C# application, so I am NOT an expert. I normally do the debugging using MS Visual Studio, and the version that I uploaded is the release version, so without debugging info.

However, could you please tell me what you did exactly - you opened an srt file, and then pressed start and got this error. In that case, could you maybe send me the file, cos I haven't seen this error yet (and I also run XP SP2). Or did you do something else as well???

[mafe]

damn... i cant reproduce it again... it works now.... damn.

I opened the srt, opened the ifo and i selected the font and size and then i pressed start.

but not i cant reproduce it... its working now :/ strange.... maybe is the srt... damn

[changjunk]

Hi, everybody.

SubtitleCreator is the great program for me to add Korean subtitle.

Now I found one big bug. As you can see on the attachment, the Text is cutted out when I increase the font size due to that text box if fixed. Would you fix this bug ASAP?

It seems like that the attachemnt is not available. Please increas the font size and see what will be happen.

thanks.

[Paddington]

I've fixed the bug - now, when you change the size of the font, the size of the subtitle window also changes... You can download the latest version again from SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=120228&package_id=130981)...

[mafe]

damn... im still having the ugly lines bug.... hmmmm

http://www.bonustrack.net/sub.png

FONT: Arial Narrow 22
Demuxed with vobedit, muxed with rejig.... can be rejig the problem? or is it subtitlecreator? i dont know.... damn it.

i will try srt2sup... and if have the same bug, the problem is rejig and not subtitlecreator.

[Wingdings]

How about a nice batch conversion feature?
That'd be nice for all those DVDs that have like 20 subtitle languages. :)

[Paddington]

Hi Mafe, what version are you using - the one from SourceForge.net (see links in my previous email) shouldn't have it anymore...

And Wingdings, why would you want to convert so many of them? I mean, if you have the original DVD, I suppose you would only need to add one. Additionally, I wonder whether IfoEdit will handle many subs correctly. It has happened to me sometimes that I get too many frame drops (due to subtitles, even if I use the originals only), and I have to remove some of them... or maybe someone knows a trick to ignore those frame drops?

[SirK]

Hi Paddington,

great work, i tried it first time and it works pretty good.
But there seems to be still the problem with the lines at the bottom of the subs.
I used the newest Version 1.2 and muxed it with ifoedit and rejig with the same result.

[mafe]

Originally posted by Paddington
Hi Mafe, what version are you using - the one from SourceForge.net (see links in my previous email) shouldn't have it anymore...

And Wingdings, why would you want to convert so many of them? I mean, if you have the original DVD, I suppose you would only need to add one. Additionally, I wonder whether IfoEdit will handle many subs correctly. It has happened to me sometimes that I get too many frame drops (due to subtitles, even if I use the originals only), and I have to remove some of them... or maybe someone knows a trick to ignore those frame drops?

yes, the last one from sourceforge, 1.2.

[Paddington]

Hi Mafe, Thanks for testing it, but are you really sure you've got the newest one. According to the stats, the new release hasn't been downloaded... However, I've had a another look, and still cannot find the bug you mention (current release v1.2.1): here is a screenshot using vobedit and rejig (see attachment, which also includes the latest version of the program)... if only I could see where the attachment is :confused: and how do I show an image...

BTW JIT debugging is on

[Asmodeus]

And what about changing min window width from 400 to bellow 352 for halfDVD encodes ?
Thx.

[SirK]

I still have lines at the bottom of the subs. Used Version: 1.2.1, Font: Arial Narrow (standard) size 22

PS: There is still Ver1.0 displayed in the abouts.

[Paddington]

You were right - I've checked my output with srt2sup, and my subtitle window definition in the sup file was one pixel more than the actual bitmap :o . Therefore, you did get an empty line (although this is actually depending on your viewer - WinDVD doesn't do this). I've fixed this bug (latest version is now 1.2.2), so please give it another go at Sourceforge.

Additionally, I've changed the version number in the about window (thanks), and you can now decrease the subtitle window width to 40 instead of 400 pixels. Hope this helps.

[SirK]

great, now it works! :)
thanks!

[mafe]

GREAT! IT WORKS NOW! WOHOO!

:)

[TomSem]

Yeah ,
those lines are gone


but i ve still one question
I can not resize the preview window
The vertical position changed from 425 to 490 in preview window
And i can not cange it because the my ok button is out screen :(

tommy

[Asmodeus]

Originally posted by Paddington
... and you can now decrease the subtitle window width to 40 instead of 400 pixels. Hope this helps.
Nope , it's still 400 :(

[Paddington]

Asmodeus, you were right - it was getting too late, I guess, making me sloppy. However, I've fixed it for you now... nothing else has changed.

[Asmodeus]

No problem :)
Works fine , thx.

[mp3boy]

hi buddy
thanks alot for your charming software, since you post it on sourceforge, do we have permission to download sourcecode? and is it possible to run c# code inside microsoft excel? i have bunch of macros for my subtitle handling.

and one more thing (a feature request):

- is it possible to have convert srt bitmap to sup?

another thing is a bug:

- when I try to make dvd using rejig it take 10 times longer than normal to multiplex subtitle and its 100 percent cpu usage at all time


thanks in advance

[Paddington]

Clearly, if you like to improve the program, you can also download the source (using a program like WinCVS) and do with it what you like. The only limitation is that if you use it for your own programs, they have to become freeware and open source too. Probably the WriteSUP method in the SUP.cs file is the most interesting one, as this is the method that converts a bitmap to a sup file. Whether you can use it inside Excel, I wouldn't know, and I would doubt it. Aren't you limited to VB, in which case you would have to translate it...

With respect to your feature request: can you explain me why you would like to convert bitmaps (I suppose you are talking about plain bitmaps, because srt bitmaps doesn't mean anything to me) to sup? As explained above, in principle it would be quite easy to do so using WriteSUP, which takes a bitmap as input anyways. But as I don't have this need, I would like to know more before I implement it. In principle, you could easily write a routine to convert a set of bitmaps while specifying their position and the colors from the palette...

Finally, ReJig is always slower than IfoEdit in my understanding - this is because he does the multiplexing in two steps: first, video & audio, later plus subtitles. Or are there specific differences between my sups and other (original) sups, which would surprise me a lot (I've also used ReJig with my sups, and didn't notice anything strange)...

[mp3boy]

I never used WinCVS and I couldn't find a link to your sourcecode.

btw, the speed problem was fixed by itself, ReJig is much faster now.

thanks

[Paddington]

mp3boy: the sources can be found here (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/subtitlecreator/SubtitleCreator/). And instead of using WinCVS (before this project, I never used it before either), you can just download every file here and compile it yourself using Visual Studio for C#. Good luck!

[TomSem]

hi paddington

The lines are gone but the background can't get transparent

Thnx for your nice tool anyway

[TomSem]

Sorry to mention the transparency bug

I 've it is fixed in the oct 17 version

[mp3boy]

there is also one bug: there is some dots and lines out of in some titles which I don't where it comes from but it seems to be the edge's alpha channel problem.

Basically I asked for source code because of some midification and add feature but maybe you can do it yourself since I don't know C#.

The Second thing is a feature request,

- Option to define the space between two line.
- Option to define Text stretch (width and height).
- Option to place the text to second line if its only single line.


I'll post more when I remember

thanks

[Paddington]

mp3boy, can you be a bit more specific - where do you see those dots and lines, font, example text file... Thanks

Wrt to the features:
- If there is only a single text line, it already goes to the bottom line (previous feature request).
- Setting stretches and spacing could be added, but is it necessary for other too.
- If you wanted to use (or mix) bitmaps, how would you deliver them.

For example (srt format):
1
00:00:10.123 -> 00:00:11.234
<I>bitmap0001.bmp</I>

2
00:00:12.123 -> 00:00:13.234
Hi there, ...

[mp3boy]

I believe stretch is definately required by everybody since it is the only way of making subtitle for wide or letter and by defining text streght in height and width.

and usually srt2sup was doing it by having separate menu (load bitmap) but I don't know if there is a requirement for color definition header to say which color for border , background, text and anti-aliasing. and I don't really think there is requirement of having mixed of them but if you like we can do it by text.bmp and we can still save [ i ][ / i ] for Italic and there is also alignment values which which has X1,X2, Y1,Y2.


usually srt bitmap does not have any mark but you could do that anyway but I don't really like srt's timecode because its not frame accurate, using timecode HH:MM:SS:FF is best way or microDVD is also quiet good and best accurate.

and other thing is about Persian font which are all joint but the outline is spliting them and i think it is the bug in rendering method which I have attached the photo. the photo is actually taken by subrip after multiplexing into dvd using ReJig.

see the character just next left side to three dots (...) in shot0001.bmp and arrow one in shot0002.bmp and I also attached the fixed image using photoshop and VB scripting to convert Text2Image by myself from excel.

another thing is that I think its best if you don't crop your image or you give option to user to have full image like those fixed or even option to define bounding box because many of my character is out of bounding box. I'm sure that will help alot.

and the last but not least question , I got v1.23 which have some bug only some time, a runtime error message popup with Detail, Continue and Quit buttoms on it. I forgot the text but I will post later if it helps.

Thanks again.
http://forum.doom9.org/images/show.gif

PS: where to get the latest and update version? I saw various location which many of them was not updated (such as VCDHelp.com)

[Asmodeus]

Latest build is crashing ReJig on DVD authoring. Previous hasn't.

EDIT: After some testing I can tell that not always. I think that there is some bug with loading background picture, because after I done this, subtitles are broken :|
Where SC writes it's own settings, cause I want to go to defaults ?

[Paddington]

Thanks for letting me know - I will try it out this weekend. I've recently uploaded a new version (a couple of days ago, same version 1.2.4 however), as C# sometimes has the annoying habit to change the user layout randomly. In this case, it was the Preview window that I had to scale back again. Maybe that caused some problems... I will come back to that...

BTW, did you read the other thread that I launched on an XML subtitle description language. Looks quite powerful!

[Asmodeus]

New version - same problem.
I know that even with this version I did some proper subs, but when I first tryed to change background it's start to get messy :( Is there place for SC settings ?

This xml language surely looks powerfull but I don't find any aplication for it :|

[Paddington]

Asmodeus, all settings are stored inside the code - it's on my todo list to change defaults to disk, and maybe even to have different profiles that you could use (e.g. for different screen formats)...

mp3boy, unfortunately I couldn't see your images. You can send me a private message if you like, and we can exchange emails...
Wrt your remark about the SRT time format: it allows a precision accuracy of milliseconds, which should be more than enough (even 30 fps only needs an accuracy of 1000/30=33ms).

I've never used srt2sup's bitmap options: what do I need to specify besides the bitmap name? Because I would prefer to use the same position as the normal text subtitles, so you can interchange them. And what kind of bitmaps does he generate: I use internally 24bpp, although I only need 4 colors, but it makes the transformation to a sup easier. And how does srt2sup deal with the bitmap colors, which I would need to map to the IFO color palette (else I cannot see the original sups)...

[Asmodeus]

Small holiday ? ;)
How's progress ?

[maques]

First of all, thanks for the tool. It's great!

I'm new to DVD subtitling, and I couldn't find really good tools for subtitling, though maybe I'm the unfortunate or the impatient one.

I find SubtitleCreator useful, I have only one small problems with it.
When I have more than two lines, like "line1|line2|line3" the result will not be what I would like (three lines), but it will automatically break to two lines, like:
line1 line2
line3

Maybe allowance of the bigger text box height would be useful. (The orginal english subtitle is also 3 lines on the DVD.)

-

I'm also looking for how to insert special characters (such as the "music note" symbol) into a subtitle, so far I found editing a font file of your own to be the easiest. Any better solution?
Maybe for such, and different font color/size, there would be good to develop (if it is not already exist...) an extension to an existing subtitle file format, where you could specify these parameters without bothering the main part much. (Of course the best would be having a program like Subtitle Workshop and SubtitleCreator put together...)

-

I'd also recommend to put a link on SourceForge to this Forum, as it would be good for the folks find this program there to come here and read what's up.

[Paddington]

Just to let you know that I've updated SubtitleCreator and moved to version 1.3 (https://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/). Most notably, the bug mp3boy illustrates above has been fixed, so the output is now much nicer (it didn't only occur with Persian fonts, but also with other sharp edges, for example 'M').

Additionally, as Asmodeus requested, a new feature has been added, and you can now use different profiles which contain the most used settings, such as:
- Subtitle Window position and size
- Font name, style and size

This is especially useful when you often have to switch between 4:3 and 16:9 or 2.35:1 screen sizes. In order to change the profiles, or add your own, edit the SubtitleCreatorProfiles.xml file. Please make sure that you keep the same format as used in the example.

Wrt allowing three lines, I don't like that very much. It really covers your screen. I have been thinking, though, on having different styles, fonts, colors etc per subtitle, and I know that there are already a couple of XML-based subtitle description languages that allow you to specify this (see the thread I started in this forum). However, I don't see a lot of people using them, I cannot download them as such yet, and as it would mean a lot of coding, it's not high on my priority list.

[CoNS]

Hi Paddington,

I've just discovered the existence of SC. I've done quite a lot of adding custom subs to DVDRs using Srt2Sup. Your program sounds good, lots of features that I've missed in Srt2Sup. I'll do some testing and report back if I find any bugs etc.

Two things I've noticed by now: In your nice .pdf guide about adding subtitles, you recommend ReJig instead of IfoEdit when authoring NTSC DVDs. The NTSC authoring issues are supposingly solved now in IfoEdit with the new version 0.971...

Also, in the GUI of SC in the "Create SUP" tab, the button "Open Sub" is split into two lines ("Open" on one line and "Sub" on another") making the text too high for the button height. My OS is Win2000 and I haven't changed font size in OS.

EDIT:

The above mentioned problem occurs in the first three tabs. It's a problem with both plain text and text in the buttons. I don't know if it's been reported by someone else already, but here's how it looks like:

http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc-image1.jpg

http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc-image2.jpg

http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc-image3.jpg

http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc-image4.jpg

A suggestion: When the info about the video format (PAL or NTSC) is loaded from the IFO, the option is disabled in the preview window. Could you make it so that the disabled option shows the actual format? Right now it shows PAL even though I've loaded an IFO from an NTSC movie.

BTW, the preview window (which cannot be resized) is larger than my desktop (1024x768, perhaps the most common resolution?). Could you squeeze the height of the options panel a bit in the preview window or move it to the right side of the picture?

In the preview window I miss a "Cancel" button so that I can return to the main window without applying the settings I made (if I close the window clicking the upper right X it seems to remember the settings, like pressing "Ok"?).

Also, in the preview window, the bottom of the black outlined box merges with the background pic and is not visible, when I'm working with a picture with black fields above and below the video. Could you make the outline pink or purple or some other not often used colour in order to make it show on all backgrounds?

Furthermore, in the Font Settings tab it would be nice to be able to see the colour codes of the colours used and be able to enter them manually (like in Srt2sup and SupRemap)... :)

Found a bug in the preview window (dunno if it's the same as reported above by another user?): When I select the profile "2.35:1 Movie" the target area box is supposingly moved according to the profile settings. But if I click "Change Font" and "Ok" (without making changes in the font window), the target area box moves down a little. So there's a bug somewhere in the vertical alignment.

The subtitle sync function where you sync with original sup file is very, very useful. Could you make it possible to save the .srt file after sync for later use? When I load a srt, use the sync function, save the sup and then load another srt, the display in the "Syncronize" tab looks like the new file also has been sync'ed? Could you reset the progress/status bar when a new srt is loaded? In this case it would also be nice to be able to load the original sup file once and for all and then use the file for the different srt files w/o reloading (saves time), i.e. split the advanced sync process in two steps: 1) load original sup file and 2) do the sync.

Finally the version number in the about tab says "1.2.3" but I've downloaded the latest version 1.3 from SourceForge?

[CoNS]

The program crashes when I load original sup file for advanced sync. I can post the error log if you want?

The error occurs when I load the sup file with "Every 2nd" line selected. When I load it with "Every 10th" it works?

Also, could you add a "Cancel" button while loading the sup file? I couple of times now I've forgotten to alter "Every 2nd" before opening the file - it loads a lot faster if it's set to "Every 10th"...

EDIT: The same goes for the output window when creating the bitmap sup file with "Show output (+ delay)" enabled - it would be VERY nice to have a "Cancel" button! :)

EDIT2: Found another bug. When clicking "Save As" in order to specify output sup file, the program reports an error when the Windows save as dialog window is cancelled.

[Paddington]

Hi CoNS,

Thanks very much for the thorough testing you have done and for the tip about IfoEdit - I didn't know that it now does NTSC movies properly! However, there is still another reason why I use Rejig instead of VobEdit. The latter sometimes splits a single subtitle in two parts, screwing up the timing. Rejig keeps it intact.

I will go through your list of remarks:
Win2000 As I am using XP, I didn't even know that it would run on Win2000, and I have to think how to deal with the fonts on the buttons.

PAL/IFO Yes, you are right - I actually thought it did show the correct format, but as I don't have many NTSC DVDs, I will have to check.

Preview panel too large/options to the right Good point, I use a higher resolution desktop, but it is easy to change that.

Preview - Cancel OK

Preview - background color Actually, the previous version did have a neutral colored background. However, I can see that you probably have a problem when using NTSC movies, something I didn't think of. I will reverse it (but not to pink, however :-).

Font color preview I am not sure whether I understand you. The bottom left bitmap showing the font name uses the actual colors that you choose in the font settings tab.

Preview - Changing font When I change the font (size), the subtitle window height will have to change too. Therefore, I prefer to reset the position to the bottom. If you choose a profile, not only the position, but also the font is set as specified in the XML file, so you cannot really use them together.

Version number Good point, I always seem to forget that!

Synchronize True, I still have to reset the progress bar. It would make sense to have a load new sup versus compare (when already loaded) function in there, so I will think about that. I am not sure, however, why you would want to save the synchronized srt file. What would you want to do with it?
Wrt a cancel button when you've selected every 2nd file... hmmm, I will think about it. Maybe it could also go in the .xlm settings file.
Finally, as I don't have the exact specification of the sup format (I needed to re-engineer the files I've got), there are sometimes sup files that I cannot, or partially cannot, convert back to bitmap. In that case, using every 10th sup is useful, as it might skip the bad subtitle in question.

Display output + cancel Don't think I will add a cancel button. I only used it to debug my app, but actually if you want to see how a subtitle looks, go to the preview window and select it. I don't see any reason why anyone would want to see each subtitle when it is being converted (slowing the whole process down considerably).

Save as + cancel That's a bug - will check it out!

Well, that should about cover it, I hope...

[CoNS]

Thanks for taking the time to answer & for taking my suggestions into consideration! It's a good program, very much needed.

ReJig/IfoEdit: Hmm, I haven't noticed the subtitle splitting issue. Is it a problem when auhtoring both PAL and NTSC? When does it occur?

Preview - background color: Pink is pretty :) Well, actually there're two things: I'm working on a disc with black bars below and above the actual movie (I think movie format is 2.35:1, not sure though). In this case I can't see where the target area ends, because the black outline of the target box merges with the lower black bar in my movie. My suggestion is to give the 1 pixel outline a strong colour, like... PINK!! The second issue is the background colour in the program when working with NTSC discs.

Font colour preview: Often when I add custom subs to a disc, the original disc doesn't have any subs or I don't want to keep the original subs. In these cases, I don't want to load the original subtitle colours - I'd rather use your default colours in the program (when no .ifo file is loaded) with the white, black and grey. But I miss two features (which Srt2Sup has, combined with SupRemap): 1) I'd like to be able to change the colour palette to choose/create my own subtitle colours. The easiest way (for you) would be by allowing the user to enter hex values like in SupRemap (as you know, subtitle colours are not in RGB format, they're YCrCB). 2) When using other colours than ones loaded from an .ifo, I need to know the hex values of the colours for entering in the .ifo manually using SupRemap, IfoEdit, PgcEdit etc. Srt2Sup has a nice function to output/show the colours used in hex values. Btw, it would also be very nice to be able to load an ifo file into SC, change/edit the colours and then save the ifo again. That's what SupRemap does for me now.

Preview - Changing font: I understand what your saying, but I still think there's a bug in the program, see my description in my first post (I select a profile and the target box moves down as it should. But if I click "Change Font" and then ok, WITHOUT changing any font settings, the target box moves further down?)

Synchronize: I'd like to be able to save the srt file for later use in SC. If I syncronize, create subs, author and burn and don't like the font size etc., it'd be nice to be able to reload the syncronized srt file again and quickly make some new fonts. It would be nice to have the cancel button in ALL CASES when loading the original sup. This process takes some time on my old Pentium 3, and I'd like to be able to cancel, for instance if I selected "Every 2nd" or "Every 5th" my mistake.

Display output + cancel: Well, you're right about just looking at the output in the preview window. But if you - as I did! - enable this option to see what how it works, it's a bit annoying that the program starts a process that hangs the rest of the program and takes a looong time (on my old PC!) without being able to cancel it.

Phew, that's it for now! KUTGW :cool: And happy new year !

[Paddington]

Happy New Year to you too!

I've had some time to play around and work on your suggestions. As always, the latest release can be found here (https://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/):

Preview - background color I've changed the whole layout of the window, so it should fit on your 1024x768 desktop. Additionally, I've reset the color to the default window color, and created a black border, so you should be able to see it properly now.

I've also enlargened all (problem) buttons now, so I hope they display properly on your Win2000 system. If not, please let me know which are still troublesome.

Font color preview The default font colors that are used can be found in the Examples directory. If you want to have another palette, you can either edit this file directly, of save a correct IFO file somewhere, and point to it in the SubtitleCreatorProfiles.xml file (at the end, I specify its name and location). This should solve your need for a default color palette without having to edit the hex values all the time.

W.r.t. your second remark about copying the color palette to a new IFO file. This feature will not be included, as it's much easier to do in IfoEdit. I mean, after multiplexing the new DVD, IfoEdit is already open, and I only need to open the original IFO file and copy the palette. Else, I would have to reopen SC again, which doesn't make sense.

Preview - changing font I now understood what you meant. It has been fixed.

Sync You can now change the synchronized subtitle file and re-open another subtitle file without reloading the original. The default number of lines that are read are specified in SubtitleCreatorProfiles.xml in the program's directory. So no cancel, but if you have a slow computer, you can change the default to 10 lines (end of the file).

Additionally, I've added two features to the advanced synchronize window:
First, when you double click in one of the panels, the other panel will jump to a similar start time (so it's easier to find a good link when the movie is almost correctly synchronized, and for checking the result).
Second, when a subtitle is split across multiple files, you will see a new window, that allows you to jump to the beginning of each part (you need to link the first and last subtitle of each part in order to sync properly).

ReJig/IfoEdit v0.95 Well, I've recently experienced this problem with the new Indiana Jones release (PAL). The english subtitle was split across two files, each containing the same data (it seems), but the time was halved. ReJig didn't have that problem.

OK, that's it for now. Let me know if you find any new bugs ;)

[mp3boy]

Hi
Thanks for your updates on your software

Some bugs:

- The bug I mentioned long ago in post with attached photo, those character generated by SC have borders where two character join each other, means persian or arabic alphabet will join eachother to make a work and the border at joint does not make it nice.

- when you save subtitle file (SUB format) in subtitle creator it saves a first subtitle as frame rate such as 23.97 or 25 or 29.97 which SC does not recognize that and still asking for framerate, and it also put it into subtitles which they don't have to be in the list

- multiple instance of Preview can be loaded and the main page is accessible after you load preview page.

- Antialiasing is not really anti-aliasing, it more looks like a single pixel border around the text, you may refer to MaestroSBT for they cool anti-aliasing, it will give the idea of what I mean.

Feature request:

- I still can't load images instead of text. if it was possible it would be a good idea... and also at same time, exporting IMAGE is also good because the DVDMaestro that I am using instead of rejig or ifoedit does not recognize SUP, and also I am not so sure but maybe you could give a try on DVD-LAB SP subtitle stream? that can be amazing too if your software have that option.

- Text SCALING: is something that I am dying to have.

Thats all for now... gotta go
Thanks again

[CoNS]

Thank you very much for the update. I'll do some testing and let you know!

[maques]

>>Wrt allowing three lines, I don't like that very much.
>>It really covers your screen.
It also depends on what size of fonts you're using...
Even if I use size 6, I can't make a 3 lines subtitle and it can be annoying if SC "reorganizes" my lines at it's favour.

OTOH, if someone wants to have 10 lines of subtitle, why not let him to do so (if font/screen size allows of course). I think this is a very "basic" feature request compared to for example "having different styles, fonts, colors etc per subtitle".

(BTW. folks, I managed to put musical note in my subtitles by editing one of my fonts. I'm still wondering if it is really the *only* [best?] way to do so...?)

Also, "saving" possibility of the profile from the program would be handy, but I can live without it.

Thanks, M.

[CoNS]

A few remarks on the new version 1.3.1:

Buttons/text: Everything looks fine now except the text "Show" in the second tab to the right of the button "Save". See picture below. Also the text "Every x lines" in the dropdown selection field is partly hidden as you can see.

http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc-image5.jpg

Preview window: Much better now! :) Found a bug, though. In NTSC mode, if the target area box comes below the video into the Windows coloured background, the box is not erased from the background when the vertical position is changed again.

The Windows coloured background in NTSC solves only a part of the problem I described with the black target box. In both PAL and NTSC I still have a problem when working with video which has black fields in the picture below and above the actual movie. In these cases (which are quite common - appear in all 2.35:1 movies etc.) I can't see the target box properly, which is why I suggest using ANY other colour than black for the target box outline. (don't HAVE to be pink or purple. White will do!!). You can see what I mean here (picture has been resized for better viewing in this forum):

http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc-image6.jpg

Also, like mp3boy I've noticed that it's a bit annoying that it's possible to open multiple preview windows. Could you make it so that if the preview window is open and the user clicks "Preview" again, the already opened window is selected instead of opening another window?

Furthermore, in the preview window when I load a background, it disappears when I change the PAL/NTSC selection. I then have to load the background again.

And finally another bug which is visible in the preview window: The vertical alignment of subtitles with only one line of text is not the same as the lower line in the subtitles with two lines of text. BTW, you could consider aligning the one line subtitles in the middle of the target box vertically instead of at the bottom. I think that's the case with most original subtitles? (EDIT: I just saw that the bottom alignment is a previous user request! Could you make the vertical alignment an option for the user to select in the preview window?)

Font name: In the first tab the chosen font is shown at the bottom to the right. It says "Sub: [font name]" (see picture below). Shouldn't it be "Font: [font name]"?

http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc-image1.jpg

(Please notice this particular screen shot is from version 1.3.0 where the button is not yet corrected)

The About tab: In the "About" tab, the links don't work as clickable hyperlinks (in Windows 2000?). All of the text gives me the link-cursor, but clicking the blue underlined urls doesn't open any browser windows. Also, the url http://tinyurl.com/5ggpm points to version 1.0 of the program (should point to the download page at SourceForge?). Also, instead of using TinyUrl you could make a link like this here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=80109), where the url is hidden?

Cancel button: Finally, I know you've already commented on it, but... Please once again consider adding a cancel button when loading an original sup file and creating the new sup file. It takes around 30-40 seconds to load the original sup file (with teh default setting) on my old PC. Would be nice to be able to quit this process. :D

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I have a suggestion for your pdf guide on how to add subtitles to a DVD. You can easily expand the guide so that it covers the common situation where you want to keep the menu (and extras etc.), too: With the freeware tool VobBlanker (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=86437) (created by jsoto), you can simply replace the old VTST with the newly authored VTST including the custom subs. By using VobBlanker instead of just copying the files manually, all vectors and sector pointers etc. are correctly updated in the IFO files.

Btw, what would it take to make the program completely stand-alone, without having to install MS .net? I'm not a programmer, so I wouldn't really know, but it seems that lotsa other C++ apps can be run w/o MS .net after they're compiled?

[CoNS]

myello paddington, you there? Still knocked up from new years eve?! :D

[Paddington]

Yeah, yeah, have been busy.
You know how it is - juggling between family, work and hobby...

New version 1.3.3 has been released (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/)

Some quick remarks, as it's getting late here:

Preview window now with yellow border around the subtitle
You can now save the synchronized subtitle file
Improved the reading of SUP files (not perfect, though). Maybe I could find out from mpucoder how they really work, but I am not a member, unfortunately
Added VobBlanker to the guide (thanks for the tip, ConNS!)
Abort button for the reading of the SUP file
Preview button will open only one copy of the window
Font name changed from Sub to Font
About tab: links are now clickable
Preliminary stretching implemented (not tested however!!!): you can define how much you want to stretch your subtitles in the .xml file.

One of the first things I still need to fix is better antialiasing (indeed, it currently is only a thin grey line, which goes fast, as true antialiasing with only one color is quite difficult), and the Persian font problem. The main difficulty being that I can't reproduce it (choosing a continuous Windows font displays correctly).

[CoNS]

Yeah, I know how it is! Thx for the new version, now we're getting there!! :)

Been testing it a bit here tonight and found some minor bugs in the preview window:

1. When I open the program, load a random .srt file and click "Preview", I get the nice Ashley Judd in PAL as default. If I change to NTSC, the bottom line of the yellow target box is now a few pixels below the actual NTSC picture. If I press PAL again, and then NTSC again, the yellow target box is now placed somewhat higher in the NTSC picture. In the process, I'm not changing the vertical alignment setting or selecting a profile or anything...

2. When I open the preview window, select NTSC and Change Font, and Ok (without making any changes in the font window), the yellow target box is moved up 1-2 pixels. This happens only the first time I do it.

3. When I open the preview window, select NTSC, click Cancel and then open the preview window again, PAL is selected by default and also says PAL in the window title BUT the nice Ms. Judd is displayed in NTSC format not PAL.

[Paddington]

Hi, I haven't had a time to fix your bugs (that will come), but I did upload another version, which contains another bug fix wrt loading sup files. Additionally, I've received another remark about the subtitle lines from Xenite, and I hope that's fixed too...

[Maxiuca]

http://www.maxiuca.com/sc_error.jpg

What now?

Oh and it happens right after I star the program :)

[CoNS]

What do you mean, Maxiuca?

EDIT: Ah, at first your pic didn't show at all. Now I see what you mean! :)

[Paddington]

Hi, Maxiuca, can you tell me a bit more when this occurred - it's a new error for me (Operating System, what did you do exactly, ..?)
Thanks!

[Maxiuca]

Hi,

My OS is Windows XP SP2 Polish Edition with .net framework and all possible updates. It happens on my desktop computer as well as on my laptop (running the same os). Funny thing is that this message is displayed in Polish on my desktop and in english on my laptop, but I guess I has something to do with the language pack for .net framework (which I probably haven't installed on the laptop). If you need any more details please just reply on this forum.

[maques]

Yesterday I also tried to report this - and some other - problems to your sf address, but it bounced back the 2MB mail. Now I created a page for it (not to trash the tread).

See it here: http://www.huweb.hu/maques/sc

BTW., at sourceforge, maybe the "web-page" could point to this forum or to some basic information page...

M.

[Paddington]

Hi Maques. Thanks for setting up everything on your server (you can also try to mail me at erik_vullings at yahoo.com).

I've downloaded your profiles and the error messages. BTW, what version are you using, as I see that your profiles file doesn't have any Stretch factors defined (new feature)? The current build is 1.3.4 (see about tab).

Let me go through your list:
1) Correct - thanks for that (I already do read those first lines, but I forgot to specify the frame rate = 29.97F (F for Float)). Fixed in the next version.

2) If you don't install it properly (no XML config file) it will crash - too bad, but not of my immediate concern (there are more pressing bugs).

3) Although I am fluent in 6 languages, Hungarian is not one of them :-) What version of SC are you currently using? I've

4) Everything displays correctly on my system???

5) Change font: Yes, this is a bug - the change font routine resets some values incorrectly...

6) I didn't find two spaces there?

7) Font numbers 0-15. Makes sense - done!

8) Output bitmaps for debugging: actually, I do this already for myself, but you are right, I will include it in my next release too.

9) 3 Lines - I see your point now, and I will try to include it: my main issue is that the formatting is something I am not happy with, and I would like to replace it altogether. However, it's a difficult method, and I am a bit reluctant to start it. My preferred solution would be to use something like a rich text edit box, and use all the standard tools available for that. However, this doesn't come with outlining, so I would have to do that manually too...

[puschpull]

I Have The Same Problem With New Version Like "Maxiuca"
:-(

W-XP Pro (SP2), Czech

http://puschpull.org/doc/screen.png

[maques]

Hi Paddington.
Seems like you can start collecting the error messages in different languages, you'll be fluent in how to say "exception" in several languages :-]

>>BTW, what version are you using, as I see that your profiles...
I use the newest 1.3.4 version with my older profile, simply because after copying the new XML, SC did the error. It also happened in the previous version (1.3.3? - I lost track :-] ).
-
I played it with a little, if I remove all the "Stretch" lines from the xml file, it starts ok (removing from the 1st/default is not enough). Maybe some Central European font/stretch issue???

>>4) Everything displays correctly on my system???
Interesting. Any hints? I'll try this on other computers then.
Maybe you don't have "subtitle" font, as specified in my profile.
That is basically "tahoma", I checked, it also happens with that.

>>6) I didn't find two spaces there?
Screenshot with highlight added to my page.
[ http://www.huweb.hu/maques/sc/2sp.png ]

>>9) 3 Lines - I see your point now, and I will try to include it:
Cool!

>>my main issue is that the formatting is something I am not happy
>>with, and I would like to replace it altogether. However, it's a
>>difficult method, and I am a bit reluctant to start it. My
>>preferred solution would be to use something like a rich text edit
>>box, and use all the standard tools available for that. However,
>>this doesn't come with outlining, so I would have to do that
>>manually too...
I (sort of) understand. Why don't you put up your concerns here, and brainstorming might get out the best approach on this.

For the rest done, thanks.

[krypton22]

I can only confirm what the other guys said, the program doesn't even start. :O(

[Paddington]

krypton22, maques, and Maxiuca, have you ever installed the dotnetfx (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=262d25e3-f589-4842-8157-034d1e7cf3a3&displaylang=en), which is needed to run C# programs?

I will post an update later today, which also includes the option to save bitmap output, and to use multiple lines...

[Maxiuca]

sure, as I wrote I have the .NET Framework installed (as well as all the other Win XP updates). The problems appears when I run the program with the xml file included in the archive. The programs runs well after deleting the file, but, of course, I can't do anything with the subtitles when the xml file is missing. I think that the might be some problems with the localized central european versions of windows (Hngary, Czech Republic, Poland...)

UPDATE: I was right and I found a (temporal) solution to this problem.
In europe (especially in central europe, but afaik in Germany also) we use commas for writing decimal fractions. USA/Canada and probably all english speaking countries (including Australia, right?) uses points. So it's 1,0 and not 1.0. If you change all 6 <Stretch> values from the xml file from 1.0 to 1,0 the program will start and work properly.

[maques]

As I wrote, if I remove the <Stretch...> tag[s], then it starts/works.
(BTW it doesn't work at all if you dont have net framework installed. I have, together with the latest updates.)

[CoNS]

Originally posted by Paddington
I will post an update later today, which also includes the option to save bitmap output, and to use multiple lines... Ahh, nice. I think your tool has a lot of potential, it's very much needed to have a better and faster tool than srt2sup. However, I still think there're things to be fixed and issues to be dealt with in SC, before I'll let srt2sup, which I know to work well but slow, go. I check back here in this thread every day to see if a new version has been released with bug fixes etc., but the development is going a bit slow ;) (yes, I know... Family, job...) BTW, have you identified the three new bugs I described regarding the preview window?

Originally posted by Maxiuca
In europe (especially in central europe, but afaik in Germany also) we use commas for writing decimal fractions. USA/Canada and probably all english speaking countries (including Australia, right?) uses points. So it's 1,0 and not 1.0. If you change all 6 <Stretch> values from the xml file from 1.0 to 1,0 the program will start and work properly. Sounds like a reasonable explanation. In Scandinavia the problem is the same, we use commas instead of period marks for decimals.

[Paddington]

Originally posted by CoNS

1. When I open the program, load a random .srt file and click "Preview", I get the nice Ashley Judd in PAL as default. If I change to NTSC, the bottom line of the yellow target box is now a few pixels below the actual NTSC picture. If I press PAL again, and then NTSC again, the yellow target box is now placed somewhat higher in the NTSC picture. In the process, I'm not changing the vertical alignment setting or selecting a profile or anything...

2. When I open the preview window, select NTSC and Change Font, and Ok (without making any changes in the font window), the yellow target box is moved up 1-2 pixels. This happens only the first time I do it.

3. When I open the preview window, select NTSC, click Cancel and then open the preview window again, PAL is selected by default and also says PAL in the window title BUT the nice Ms. Judd is displayed in NTSC format not PAL.

The new version (https://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/) has fixed these bugs, and probably introduced some others for you to find :D
1. In principle, it tries to keep the position on the same height. However, you won't be able to move the subtitle window outside the screen, so it might move up when you switch from PAL to NTSC, and remain on the same height when you switch back.

2. I've fixed this stupid bug in Windows: when I start, I specify Arial Narrow, size 20, and Windows sets this correctly. However, if you do the same via the standard change font dialog (or change nothing), it sets the font to 19.800xxx, moving the window up a bit! How stupid!

3. Fixed.

Maxiuaca, Thanks for finding that bug with the decimals!:p. I am surprised that this happens with XML files, which should be easy to interchange. Probably, this interoperability issue has been solved somehow, but in the mean time, I've converted the stretch to percentages (I've multiplied the value with 100, so I don't need to read decimals.

BTW, I am originally Dutch, although a bit less than a year ago, I've migrated to Australia, so I am also used to commas for decimals...

Finally, have a look at the new version, which allows you to specify a couple of extra functionality in the Preview window, or in the XML config file:
Specify how many lines you wish to use for the subtitle
Specify whether you want SC to automatically wrap lines
Specify whether you want SC to generate bitmaps of the subtitles for you
Specify whether you want SC to remove double spaces and other types of annoyances

[krypton22]

works a charm now, thanks man (and thanks to Maxiuca and maques for their detective work, Id never thought of that)

[CoNS]

Hmm, weird. When I download v1.4 from SourceForge and run it, it says v1.3.4 under the About tab. Also, I can't see those new options you describe, with number of lines etc...?

[Paddington]

Hi CoNS, can you give it another go today...

[CoNS]

Yep, now I get version 1.4 when I click the link at SourceForge. Very weird that it worked for krypton22 yesterday, though?

Looks good so far. Thanks for the new version. :) Will do some more testing later.

A suggestion: When the program starts up, you're supposed to open a subtitle file as the first thing. Until then the options at the start tab is greyed out (disabled). Instead of displaying the popup window with a warning when clicking the two middle tabs, could you grey out those, too? Or alternatively let the user click the tabs but have the options greyed out (until a subtitle file is loaded)? It's a very small detail, but it would make the program work a bit more like the typical GUI of Windows programs.

[maques]

Originally posted by CoNS
A suggestion: When the program starts up, you're supposed to open a subtitle file as the first thing. ... Instead ...
Why not start with an open file dialog right away instead?

[Paddington]

BTW, I found that the problem with the lines under the subtitles occured again, and I fixed and updated the release.

[marco333]

Hi Paddington,

thanks a lot for the great program. I'm using the 1.4.1 version with Win XP. The problem I have is that I can't get polish subtitles to display correctly.
Here is an example:

1
00:02:48,360 --> 00:02:52,360
Mog╣ pa±stwo siΩ zwracaµ do mnie Ruby, kochanie lub jakkolwiek, ale proszΩ siΩ nie sp≤ƒniaµ na £niadanie

All that funny characters should be actually replaced by the real fonts from the Central European Script but it doesn't work.

If you open the SRT example above and go to the preview window please try to change the font/script to CE. Nothing will change on the preview screen (all those ≤ ƒ ╣ remain) and script language goes back to western.

Thank you a lot for checking.
Marco

[CoNS]

Found a couple of bugs in v1.4.1:

Under "Font Settings" tab, the colour numbers in the four selection fields don't match the numbers shown to the right at the ifo palette (hmmm, this bug has been reported before?)

When I click "Change Font", the program doesn't respond to any changes of the font size. It keeps the default size 22...?

...and a couple of suggestions, which I dare to repeat: :)

Could you enable user selection of vertical alignment within the target area (options of bottom, middle or top)?

Is there no way the program can be made into a standalone program without the .NET expansion? Like many other C++ programs...

BTW, what do you think about the suggestion about simply greying out the features until a subtitle file is loaded - instead of those warnings?

[Paddington]

Hi CoNS,

I've found that problem with the numbers as well, but couldn't let anyone know as the forum was down. I have already fixed that, and the latest release is now version 1.4.2, which also contains a DTD (Document Type Definition) for the XML file. And it allows you to change the space between different font styles (sometimes, when you have italics between regular font, the spacing isn't correct).

I didn't notice the one about the font size though... I will look into that!

About your feature request:

I will implement the vertical alignment for you: actually, I am also looking at a new XML subtitle format, Timed Text Style (see one of my other threads in this forum), but nobody is using it yet, so you won't be able to find any subs for them. However, it allows you to specify colors, fonts, styles, window positions, sizes, hor/ver alignment, so it's really neat, although I would have to program an editor for that...
C# cannot easily be changed/converted to C++, which doesn't need the .net framework. Another developer, Finiteyoda, wanted to port it, but I haven't heard from him for a long time, and I am certainly not going to do it. It would mean a complete rewrite of all the GUI logic, conversions to pointers, finding other library routines...
Greying the features sounds good, but I actually tried to do it when I started for the first time using the tabs. However, I couldn't find out how to do it, so I've left it at that. I will give it another go...


marco333: I will have a look at your subtitle problem - as I am using my tool often for Romanian subtitles, I think that I also use CE style, which works fine for me... Keep you informed...

[yaz]

Originally posted by Paddington
I am also looking at a new XML subtitle format, Timed Text Style (see one of my other threads in this forum), but nobody is using it yet, so you won't be able to find any subs for them. However, it allows you to specify colors, fonts, styles, window positions, sizes, hor/ver alignment, so it's really neat, although I would have to program an editor for that...maybe u know that mp4box (gpac project) handles .ttx subs. mp4box uses this form/style for muxing subs into mp4 container. mp4box can even generate .ttx from .srt /wout muxing, so producing only the the subs.
the bests
y

[Paddington]

Originally posted by marco333
thanks a lot for the great program. I'm using the 1.4.1 version with Win XP. The problem I have is that I can't get polish subtitles to display correctly.
Thank you a lot for checking.
Marco

There is a quick work around, that seems to do it: I've downloaded Troy in Polish, and I can see 'e' and 'a' with mirrored commas underneath, 'ó' and 'l' with a diagonal line through it.

How did I display this: go to control panel, select "Regional and language options", Advanced, select Polish as the Language for non-unicode programs, and reboot.

I will look if there is a more elegant solution too...

[Paddington]

Version 1.4.3 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/) is available!

New feature: you can select how to align your subtitles vertically (top, bottom or centre), just as CoNS has requested.

Fixed some bugs, related to changing the font size and the display of time related text.

[CoNS]

Nice, thanks, will test! :)

Originally posted by Paddington
I've downloaded Troy in Polish(cough)...!!

EDIT: Okay, did a bit of testing and of course I found some more bugs for you to fix!!! :p

Now the font size selection works again. But when a font type and/or size is selected via "Change Font" under the "Font Settings" tab, the selection is not carried through to the font selection in the preview window and vice versa.

Also, there's an issue with the vertical alignment. Must have been there the whole time, but I just saw it now that I played around with the new vertical alignment option: The position of the base line of the text depends on whether the letters in the current generated subtitle picture have any parts that go below the base line, typically the letters g, j, q, p, but also some capital letters and other special characters depending on the font. Thus, you can have subpictures generated with SC where the alignment differs from picture to picture ("jumps up and down") even though they have the same number of lines. Is there any way to align the text by the base line of the font instead?

BTW, could you name the alignment option "Vertical alignment" instead, so that it's clear that it's not the horizontal alignment you're changing.

And finally: How does the "Space" option work in the preview window? I tried to change the value from 1-40 for both normal text and italic text, but I couldn't see any difference at all in the preview?

[Paddington]

I knew about the vertical alignment problem, but didn't know how to fix it... In principle, I compute the bounding box of a subtitle, and align that vertically. In that way, it's also very easy to change it to top/centre/bottom. So top should be right, but both others not. Any ideas are welcome...

The spacing is intended to correct a bug in the windows libraries, which don't measure a text width accurately when not using antialiasing. You will notice it in a sentence like:
I <i>love</i> Japanese food. Depending on the font you choose, the spacing around "love" will be different (try switching from Arial to Tahoma), and you can correct that a bit with the spacing option. However, for full italic (or bold) sentences, it doesn't matter.

And thanks for mentioning the other bug too...

[CoNS]

It seems like the top alignment differs, too, depending on the height of the tallest letter in the top line? For example, the base line of a line of subtitles with small letters like e, a, o etc. are "pushed up" in comparison with a line that has capitol letters or other tall letters like l, t, i etc.?

Hmmm, if only the top alignment was always the same, then you could perhaps fix the problem by precalculating the max height of the font and align the subpictures this way?

[marco333]

Hi Paddington, your work around works fine. Thank you

[violao]

@paddington,

At first let me say that I love your tool. I believe that subtitles it produces can compare with any professional dvds around. And compared to existing GPL tools, well, forget about any of them. I have made a lot of subtitles with all of them and they all look awful. Either they produce no antialiasing, which is bad, or they make it look even worse than without it. Yours sure look great. But, I think I found something that may be a bug in your software, or perhaps it is in my player? Who knows, but I think it's better to solve it than to guess who among us doesn't stick to standards. Anyway, I found that whenever your subtitler puts subtitle box at an ODD offset my player displays something that can be compared to interlaced picture. At EVEN offsets that doesn't happen. I believe it has to do something with YUV colorspace, although I cannot explain it.

I did find a workaraound and it involves using dvdsuptools to decode your subtitles to bmp files, then re-encode them back into sup by fixing them to an EVEN offset from the bottom and after that they work beautifully. But I would rather skip this step if possible, and I believe it should be rather easy for you to fix this offset to EVEN number.

Congratulations on the great work and thank you very much for sharing it with us.

[lordyu]

Hi all,

I've been playing with adding new subtitle streams to DVD following Paddington's guide "Adding subtitles to a DVD.pdf" comes with his great tool SubtitleCreator. It's been quite difficult and unsuccessful with many problems, until now. First, I'm gonna talk about the problems I had and the workarounds and then I'll talk about the way to avoid these problems which I just found today.

All these problems seem to happen only to me. Nobody else has ever mentioned any of them in this thread. I wonder why. Maybe I am lucky. Anyway I thought I should share it just in case anyone experienced the same problems and haven't found a solution.

The problems:
In the muxing step using IfoEdit I usually got one of these errors:
1. Too many frame drops!
2. INTERNAL ERROR: additional data required but no free space in input buffer

In the first case, IfoEdit would stop everything and quit itself.
In the second case, IfoEdit would continue muxing but for the final output the sound would disappear from the point of the error to the end of the movie.

The PDF document suggested removing some original subtitle streams but that wouldn't do as I needed them. It also suggested trying ReJig. I did try ReJig and another new muxing tool -- Muxman but none of them would work perfectly. After some experiment I found that the second case was caused by the sound file(s). After searching Doom9, I had the problem fixed with the help of AC3Fix.

For the first case, it was the subtitle files. I could add my newly-created subtitles (by SubtitleCreator) but not those .sup files extracted from the original DVD using VobEdit. It took me a week to find a fix -- SubToSup. According to the ReadMe.txt the author of SubToSup had the same problem and I quote:

"I had trouble when i use VobEdit to extract the subtitles. Because VobEdit resets the subtitle times to 0 if a new Vob-ID was found in the movie stream. IfoEdit produces a buffer underrun message if you try to use this generated .sup files as subtitle files."

So I had to go a different route:
DVD--> DVD Decrypter --.ifo/.vob(subtitle streams only)--> VobSub --.idx/.sub--> SubToSup --.sup--> IfoEdit -->New DVD

That's for the subtitle streams from the DVD. What about my new subtitle stream(s)? Well, here's how I had to do it:

.srt--> Subtitle Workshop --.ssa--> MaestroSBT --.son/.spf/.bmp--> Son2VobSub --.idx/.sub--> SubToSup --.sup--> IfoEdit -->New DVD

Painful process? Yes, but it worked. Although not perfectly as there was another problem, the subtitles showed up too early. I found the exact number of the time by using DVD Decrypter to demux the subtitle streams and looking at the file name like this, for example:
VTS_03_1 - 0x24 - Subtitle - English - [SP 05~ W-L] - DELAY 36880ms.SUB

which mean I had to delay that subtitle stream for 36880ms to get it right. There's no option in IfoEdit to delay the subtitle streams so I had to use VobSub's SubResync to fix this problem and I had to do it for every single stream I wanted to keep in the new DVD. This SubResync process was done before SubToSup. Also because all the streams were in one .idx/.sub I had to use VobSubStrip to separate each of the streams into several sets of .idx/.sub before I could use SubResync on each of them to fix the timing.

Ok, now, you can forget everything above for the real solution I just found today. As you can see the real cause of the problems is VobEdit. There is a better tool called PgcDemux by the same author of VobBlanker. This tool is quite up-to-date compared to VobEdit. As for its performance in demuxing it doesn't only produce perfect sound files without the need of AC3Fix or DTSFix (if any) but also perfect subtitle files with correct timing. So if you ever experience the same problems I had, using this little great tool instead of VobEdit to demux could save you from troubles.

Cheers.

[Paddington]

Thanks for the bug reports: the (hopefully) fixed version 1.4.4 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/) can be found at the usual place.
Bug fixes:

Subtitles will always start on even positions, and be of even height (some persons reported problems if this was not the case).
Fixed the vertical alignment.
Removed the "change font" option from the settings menu.

New features:

You can set the horizontal alignment (left/right) per line in the SRT file, e.g. <a left> aligns the current line left.
You can use different fonts within each subtitle, for example to use a different size, or different font family. In the Examples directory, you can see some nice examples, for example to include a musical note, or to write a name in a different font.

These new features haven't been thoroughly tested yet, so have a go at it...

[Paddington]

The current version (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/) allows you to overrule the global positioning of the subtitle by adding extra commands to the srt file, e.g.
1
00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:12,000 <w 100,150,1>
<f Name='Arial Narrow', Type='Italic', Size='30'>Title of movie</f>

This displays the title of the movie at position (100,150), and it will be wrapped (if necessary) to 1 line of text. Additionally, it shows you how to overrule the global font settings.

[CoNS]

Hi Paddington,

Thanks for the new versions. Looking good. I've been doing some more testing, and here's what I've noticed:

There're still some bugs in the preview window. When I change the PAL/NTSC setting, the (default) background image of the nice ms. Judd doesn't change, it simply disappears and goes grey/blank. I can get the new image to show by selecting a subtitle line or change the subtitle alignment (which I BTW still think you should call "vertical subtitle alignment"!). Don't know if this is related to Win2000 only, 'cause it's pretty obvious and noone else has complained, but I get the error every time anyway.

Also, in the preview window, why can't I change the width of the target area to a higher value than 580? The width of both the PAL and NTSC formats is 720, so why doesn't the program allow me to expand the width up to 720? (I have some subtitles with long sentences/lines, and it doesn't look so good when they're resized to a smaller size by SC all the time!)

Found a bug (at least I think it's a bug?) in the Create SUP tab. The text (before loading sub/ifo files and specifying output dir) is aligned to the left. When files are loaded/output dir specified, the text is aligned to the right?

Finally, there might be a bug in the vertical alignment of the subs (not inside the target area, this looks fine now, but the overall vertical alignment of the target area). I've burned some discs with subs from SC with various font sizes but with the same vertical position, and the target area seems to vary quite a lot in these cases? Should it do that? The subs looked fine in the preview window in SC, but the ones with the biggest point size were placed below the video in the output when viewed on my standalone (I have used the correct PAL/NTSC setting, so that's not the problem)

Ahh, and BTW, thanks for the credits in the about tab!! :p

[maques]

Gee, thanks for the about tab, haven't noticed yet :-)

SC really begins to be a studio-grade subtitler.
If you write an editor in it, I suppose everybody can throw away every other subtitle utilities... :-)

To do some work for the about tab then:
I planned to report some "problems" since some time ago, but the last one is a bit complex, and I didn't have time to go into the details deeply.
Anyhow not to further delay myself, I report my current findings. To save space here, I attach the referred pictures on my website, at
http://www.huweb.hu/maques/sc

- As CoNS noted too, on the "Create SUP" tab the 3 filenames get right arranged, after you select something. (see picture 1)

- If you go "Font Settings", change "Outline width" go to Preview - you don't get the selected outline width.
If you go back, you see Outline width changed back to the default 3.
If you just create sup, it works fine, but additionally - as I saw, "outline 0" creates the same file as with "outline 1" (fc /b shows no difference)

- I also have problems with the pal/ntsc change, it behaves very strangely not just what CoNS mentioned, but for example if you change to 3(4,5,...) lines, then try to change back, the "top" position will not change, see picture 2.
On that picture, I changed lines up to 10, then down to 5.
See result... Is it intentional?
Generally, I try not to touch thing here :-)

- The "complex" problem:
I subtitled a film with approx 1500 lines, using rejig. Then I noticed that during the playback, subtitle suddenly ceases to display. It happened at 3-4 titles out of the 1500.

Part of the original SRT looked like this.
Here, next sub starts at previous endings (exactly).
360 - 00:20:49,014 --> 00:20:53,018
361 - 00:20:53,018 --> 00:20:56,021
362 - 00:20:56,021 --> 00:21:00,025
363 - 00:21:00,025 --> 00:21:02,027
364 - 00:21:02,027 --> 00:21:05,030
365 - 00:21:05,030 --> 00:21:08,533

I decoded the sup from the DVD, and saw that subtitle times slightly changed (I guess that's normal), but title 362 (the ill behaving one)
looked like this:
362 - 00:00:00:00 --> 00:00:04:03
(see picture 3)
After such one, subtitle display "switched off".
(Of course stepping with subtitle button to the same language helps)

I think that this is the problem of rejig, because ifoedit authored a perfect dvd out of this sup, but looking into the sup file gives an interesting result too.

This is the final SUP's info, after dvdsupdecode.
Note that starts are *earlier* than previous finish. (1-2 frame)
{31225}{31327}{_000360.bmp}
{31325}{31402}{_000361.bmp}
{31401}{31503}{_000362.bmp}
{31501}{31552}{_000363.bmp}
{31551}{31628}{_000364.bmp}
{31626}{31716}{_000365.bmp}

Shouldn't these be something like
{x}{y}
{y}{z}
or
{x}{y}
{y+1}{z}
instead of
{x}{y}
{y-2}{z}

[derebo]

hi,

i've just learnt about your proggie and it looks great. can't wait to get home and try it. one simple question i need to ask:

can i resize any subtitle box to any size i want? since i don't want the box to be transparent, i want the subtitle box to hide some hardcoded subs. if subtitle creator can do that... you're the boss!!!

greetings,

[derebo]

well, i've tried it. it's a good piece of soft indeed. now, concerning the box and resizing... i've realized it can be done but at a global level. if you want to customize box size for any subtitle you have to modify the .srt subtitle file and every line by hand... if resizing could be applied graphically to any subtitle... ah! :)

greetings,

[E-Male]

i only had a quick look at this tool, but it's like to become my standart too for making dvd subs

one request i have:
would it be possible to remove the limit of the subtitle width?
so the subs background can cover the entire picture
so i could replace intertitles with a sub stream

[Paddington]

Thanks for all your feedback!

I've been working on some major changes over the weekend, but they are not ready to post yet. Next weekend should be OK though...

What did I already do/currently working on:

I've fixed the subtitle timing problem reported by maques
I've removed the outline width from the font settings tab. Except for an easy fix, this is also because I want to control this feature, as well as the colors, from the preview window.
As maques suggested, and something I've stalled for a long time, I am working on a simple editor to adjust the text and timing, as well as the other settings... Currently, I can only change it manually, so for now I am working on some buttons to make it quicker.
As CoNS noted, there was a problem with the subtitle width setting, which I've already fixed - if you first set the X-position to 0, then you should be able to set the width to 720.
Wrt the right alignment on the main tab, as CoNS and maques remarked, is something I've removed again.
Finally, I want to have a switch between global and local changes of the settings, so I can reuse the same menu to control local settings too.
I will also have a look at resizing the subtitle window using the mouse (position and width in pixels, height in increment of lines)

As you see, some of the bugs reported by CoNS and others haven't been addressed yet, but I hope to find some time next week for them too! Especially with the different font sizes will cause me some thought - at the moment, when changing the font size, I don't change the subtitle window height automatically, but override it manually using <w xpos,ypos,lines w/>....

[krypton22]

take your time, yer doing a great job here

[E-Male]

Originally posted by Paddington
.As CoNS noted, there was a problem with the subtitle width setting, which I've already fixed - if you first set the X-position to 0, then you should be able to set the width to 720...
seems to be what is my problem, too
thx for looking into it :)

[derebo]

hi,

[[*}I will also have a look at resizing the subtitle window using the mouse (position and width in pixels, height in increment of lines)


that'd be superb! take your time, but not much! ;) i'm definitely looking forward to it being implemented. and as E-Male suggested, that could be very useful to subtitle intertitles.

it'd be a great step definitely.

regards and congratulations,

[E-Male]

it seems that the combination SubtitleCreator and MuxMan produces wrong colors

[CoNS]

I'm looking forward to the new version :p

Until it's ready, the target area width issue can be worked around by reducing the x position value in the "SubtitleCreatorProfiles.xml" file... This will let you go above a width of 580, but you still can't change the value inside the program itself.

[Paddington]

Here is the latest version (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/) with a complete makeover of the preview window. New features include:
a simple editor to change the subtitles
buttont to align, change the font of a word, and for bold, italics and underline
Editor mode to change all subtitles, or one the current
Move and resize the subtitle window with the mouse
Moved the font color settings to the preview window

And some bugs were fixed too:
Removed the width limitation
The option to position one subtitle somewhere else actually works now :-)
Fixed the alignment in the main window
Fixed the timing problem when two subtitles are very near
And probably some others too...

http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=120228&ssid=7489

[derebo]

paddington,

you're just great!!! i'm glad i can be the first one in this thread to congratulate your for this new version. can't wait to get home and give it a try.

regards,

[derebo]

hi,

i must be doing something wrong or there's some kind of bug in subtitlecreator that prevents me from drawing a global box size the way i like :(

the original dvd has no subtitles at all.

the steps i follow are:

1. load subtitlecreator
2. load subtitle file, ifo file (from subtitle creator examples dir) and select sup file to save
3. click on preview
4. i change the default settings to match what i'm interested in. i change font colors, subtitle window size and even font name and size!
5. click ok and back to the main menu but see how it still says Arial Narrow!! :(
6. click start and .sup is created
7. rejig v0.5e or ifoedit to author dvd
8. see resulting capture. the subtitle box doesn't look what it should... since the black non-transparent subtitle box does not match in size! :( the background looks white since i have edited the resulting ifo file with subremap. however, i am much more concerned with box width and height not matching my settings...

do you think you know what can be wrong about it? i think i've tried almost everything...

thanks in advance,

[Paddington]

Hi derebo, thanks for testing it so quickly!

You didn't do anything wrong - it's just that I always made the subtitles as small as possible, so they wouldn't occupy too much space. However, I can understand that in your case, you wish to block always the same amount of space. Therefore, I've changed the code a bit, and my new version 1.5.2 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/) should take care of your situation. Additionally, I've fixed some incorrect updates if you opened the preview window twice, and the main window now displays the correct font (thanks for pointing that out) after it receives your mouse focus again.

BTW, instead of using subremap, you could also use the actual colors that you liked from the example ifo, and then specify that ifo file in ReJig, so it automatically copies the color palette. Alternatively, using IfoEdit, you open the example ifo file, select the current PGC and copy the color palette, and paste it in the new ifo PGC.

[derebo]

hi,

You didn't do anything wrong - it's just that I always made the subtitles as small as possible, so they wouldn't occupy too much space.
thanks for letting me know. i thought i was going crazy yesterday night :devil:

I can understand that in your case, you wish to block always the same amount of space. Therefore, I've changed the code a bit, and my new version 1.5.2 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/)

great! i'll try it after lunch so you'll get my report before dinner time ;) and yes, i had realized about the preview window bug but forgot to tell you. i'll try ReJig as you advice too.

Alternatively, using IfoEdit, you open the example ifo file, select the current PGC and copy the color palette, and paste it in the new ifo PGC. [/B]

i hadn't try that so it's time. seems a little bit confusing, though... if i can't make it, i'll ask for more detailed info :rolleyes:

greetings,

[derebo]

hi,

report time: the box is successfully created!

/me patting you on the back :)

now, the only bug (maybe) i've found is when changing font name and size in preview window, changes remain but do not show on the main window (not preview window). when .sup has been created, the new font name is shown. not much of a problem, though, since changes remain, but just to let you know.

greetings,

[Paddington]

Hi derebo, good to see it works for you too :D
Wrt the IfoEdit option of copying the colors, the guide in the doc section should give you a more detailed explanation (it takes less than a minute after IfoEdit is done).
Wrt the font name - actually, it should show up properly again, not when you close the window, but when you enter the main area with the mouse again (this event triggers writing the new name - not very elegant, and I will look for a better solution, but on the short term, all I could do...

[mp3boy]

Hi
Thanks again for your free tool, there was a bug which I reported long ago, and I've seen alot of improvements in your tool however that one still remain which is rendering Persian (arabic like) characters when they join, its like Persian character join each other to make a word (not all the time joined but most of time) and in this case the Place my persian character join it will be sort of like OVERLAPPING and in that place instead of having white color (the text color) we have black color (the stroke color).

I have attached a photo to this post which you might take a look forb etter understanding

Thanks in advance

[CoNS]

Hi Paddington,

That last version really rocks! Srt2sup is history on my PC! A very, very small detail: In the preview window in PAL mode, the black line at the bottom of the picture is broken - it's like th picture in PAL is too high for the dedicated space.

The preview window is close to the max size of a 1024x768 desktop resolution with all those (nice) things you put in that window. You can gain a few pixels in the height by reducing the height of the buttons at the bottom of the window. If more options/items are to be added to the preview window you may have to reconsider the basic layout/structure of the preview window?

One last thing: When loading a custom background pic in NTSC mode it looks like there's something wrong with the aspect ratio - like the pic is too "tall"? At least that has been the case with the last couples of NTSC discs I've edited. With the last disc, I loaded it into two different software players, which both said that the aspect ratio was exactly 16:9. The picture looked normal in the soft players but stretched vertically in SC?

[TheJez]

Hi Paddington,

A question reg. SubTitleCreator: Is there a limitation regarding the number of subtitles ? I have a srt-file containing 7000 substitles, each 1 second long. When I try to load the srt-file, I get the message "Error reading file blahblah.srt". When I cut it and leave just the first 900 subtitles in, there's no problem !

Thanks for this great program !

TheJez

[MomoNyo]

Thanks for a great sup creating program!

I just followed the Adding subtitles to a DVD pdf to try and add subtitles to a DVD I have which came with no subtitles.

I was especially interested in keeping the menus etc. Creating the subs and adding them to the movie was easy enough (although I didn't like the awkward multi-step approach ReJig does to make the vobs).

Then I tried the replace trick with VobBlanker and here's where I hit the problems.

First, it said that there were not as many replacement cells as there was originally (or words to that effect). Cell #1 was replaced, but the remaining 7 were replaced with blank cells. It's as if it's tried to replace the first cell/chapter with the entire new set of (subbed) vob files. Worse still, as the original DVD didn't have any subs, the original IFO isn't updated with the new one and my subs have disappeared. The chapter selection doesn't work either.

Has anyone else had this snag and is there a workaround? I'm guessing I might be able to add the subs to the original IFO with IFOEdit (though I may need some guidance on how to do this), but what about the cell replacing?

Hope you can help. Thanks in advance!

[CoNS]

@MomoNyo: You may want to ask for help in the VobBlanker thread here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=86437

[MomoNyo]

Good point CoNS. That's what happens when you try this stuff late into the morning :)

[ozzii]

Hi!
Just a little question abut your prog.

I can't change the script of the font.
I chose tahoma for font and central europe for script, but my caracters (serbian) didn't apears. when I come bach to the font seting I saw that the script come back to occidental.

What can I do ????

Thanks in advance for your help

[Erasmus]

hi,
first let me say that i have been using your program for a while now and its really great, thanx for this very good program :).

I have just upgraded to v1.5.2, and since i upgraded to 1.5.2 i have the following problem:
- I load the subtitle file (.srt)
- I load the .ifo file
- I press preview and get the following error message:

An unhandled exception has occurred in your application....

************** Exception Text **************
System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Specified argument was out of the range of valid values.
Parameter name: '0' is not a valid value for 'index'.
at System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox.set_SelectedIndex(Int32 value)
at SubtitleCreator.PreviewForm.nupVerticalPos_ValueChanged(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.NumericUpDown.OnValueChanged(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.NumericUpDown.set_Value(Decimal value)
at System.Windows.Forms.NumericUpDown.set_Maximum(Decimal value)
at SubtitleCreator.PreviewForm.SelectNTSC_CheckedChanged(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.RadioButton.OnCheckedChanged(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.RadioButton.set_Checked(Boolean value)
at SubtitleCreator.PreviewForm..ctor()
at SubtitleCreator.MainForm.IDButtonSettings_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mevent)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)

...

If i press preview without loading the .ifo (only load the .srt) it works fine. This seams to happend with any .srt/.ifo i open (including ones which worked for me with an older 1.4.? version ).

Note: i tried to download an older version of subtitlecreator from sourceforge but when i select to download an older version i always get the newest.

Thanx for this great program!

[hej456]

Hi Paddington.

Thanks youfor this great tool, been using it a lot.

I was wondering if it was possible to implement a function which gives you the ability to reposition (vertical) the subpictures in original .sup files ripped from a DVD?

Thanks

hej456

[Paddington]

Originally posted by ozzii
I can't change the script of the font.
I chose tahoma for font and central europe for script, but my caracters (serbian) didn't apears. when I come bach to the font seting I saw that the script come back to occidental.


Did you see a previous post with the same question - basically, go to control panel, select Regional and Language options, Advanced tab, and set the Language for Non-unicode programs to Serbian. I think that should work...

[Paddington]

Originally posted by hej456
I was wondering if it was possible to implement a function which gives you the ability to reposition (vertical) the subpictures in original .sup files ripped from a DVD?

That wouldn't been too hard to implement, but are more people interested in such a feature?

[Paddington]

Originally posted by Erasmus

I have just upgraded to v1.5.2, and since i upgraded to 1.5.2 i have the following problem:
- I load the subtitle file (.srt)
- I load the .ifo file
- I press preview and get the following error message:

Note: i tried to download an older version of subtitlecreator from sourceforge but when i select to download an older version i always get the newest.


Hmmm, not so nice: does this problem occur with NTSC or PAL files?

Second, to retrieve a previous version, go to here (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=120228)

[ozzii]

Originally posted by Paddington
Did you see a previous post with the same question - basically, go to control panel, select Regional and Language options, Advanced tab, and set the Language for Non-unicode programs to Serbian. I think that should work...

I do it but, it didn't work.
I will try it again today and I told you the result.
Sorry I didn't see the same post.:confused:

[ozzii]

I didn't undersand, Now it's working :confused: :confused: :confused: :confused:

Sorry:cool:

[krypton22]

Originally posted by Paddington
Originally posted by hej456
I was wondering if it was possible to implement a function which gives you the ability to reposition (vertical) the subpictures in original .sup files ripped from a DVD?

That wouldn't been too hard to implement, but are more people interested in such a feature?
I think it would be a nice touch although theres an obvious workaround (rip the original subs with SubRip, adjust the srt in SC and remux).

[drieg]

Hi,

first I'd like to say thanks for this great tool. It's exactly what I was looking for for a long long time...


I tried v1.5.1 and v1.5.2 and it seems that both last versions have problems with color subtitles (other than 4-2-0-5 color schema).
During creating a SUP file I'm using color palette from your Examples\VTS_01_0.IFO file and I also use this file for importing colors to my DVD IFO file in IfoEdit.
So my IFO-file's PGC (VTS_PGCITI->VTS_PGC_1) is:

[000000a5] Color 0 Y Cr CB 16 128 128 [10 80 80 ]
[000000a9] Color 1 Y Cr CB 43 128 128 [2b 80 80 ]
[000000ad] Color 2 Y Cr CB 235 128 128 [eb 80 80 ]
[000000b1] Color 3 Y Cr CB 81 239 90 [51 ef 5a ]
[000000b5] Color 4 Y Cr CB 125 128 128 [7d 80 80 ]
[000000b9] Color 5 Y Cr CB 180 128 128 [b4 80 80 ]
[000000bd] Color 6 Y Cr CB 169 16 165 [a9 10 a5 ]
[000000c1] Color 7 Y Cr CB 106 221 202 [6a dd ca ]
[000000c5] Color 8 Y Cr CB 210 146 16 [d2 92 10 ]
[000000c9] Color 9 Y Cr CB 28 118 184 [1c 76 b8 ]
[000000cd] Color 10 Y Cr CB 80 80 90 [50 50 5a ]
[000000d1] Color 11 Y Cr CB 48 184 109 [30 b8 6d ]
[000000d5] Color 12 Y Cr CB 93 71 146 [5d 47 92 ]
[000000d9] Color 13 Y Cr CB 61 175 165 [3d af a5 ]
[000000dd] Color 14 Y Cr CB 113 137 71 [71 89 47 ]
[000000e1] Color 15 Y Cr CB 235 128 128 [eb 80 80 ]

And here's my problem. When I make SUP file without any changes (using subtitle's default color scheme 4-2-0-5),
everything is OK (sor_cz_5024.sup, 31k). If I change subtitle color to yellow or red (i.e. color scheme 4-8-0-14, resp. 4-3-0-11 (in hex 4-8-0-e and 4-3-0-b)),
the output SUP-file is almost half-size (see sor_cz_e084.sup, resp. sor_cz_b034, both 17k). And if you binary compare red and yellow output file, you see that they differ only in hex values defining colors strings (b034 and e084).

This results in bad subtitle color displaying on DVD (subtitle color is black).
white is OK:
cap001_4205.jpg

red or yellow shown as black:
cap002_4x0x.jpg


It seems that red and yellow SUP files refers to Color 0 in PGC (black) because if I change Color 0 from black to pink in my DVD IFO file, like this:

[000000a5] Color 0 Y Cr CB 106 221 202 [6a dd ca ]

the subtitles are pink too (all colors, the text, outline and antialias as well).

cap004_4x0x_color0_pink.jpg


And one more think. SubtitleCreator displays Color 15 as a purple, but it's wtihe actually (IFO says: YCbCr=235 128 128). SubRip 1.17.1 displays it correctly.

Wish you the best of luck in your great work...
drieg

[hej456]

Originally posted by krypton22
I think it would be a nice touch although theres an obvious workaround (rip the original subs with SubRip, adjust the srt in SC and remux).

Yeah I know this workaround - been using that untill now, but that includes ripping the subs using OCR - making it possible to get bad chars included....

It would be a great feature if possible.

Thanks

hej456

[Erasmus]

Originally posted by Paddington
Hmmm, not so nice: does this problem occur with NTSC or PAL files?

NTSC files, currently i don't have any PAL DVDs to try out.


Originally posted by Paddington
Second, to retrieve a previous version, go to here (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=120228)
Thats where i tried to get a previous version from. But no matter what version i choose on that page i always get the same file (which is v1.5.2).


Originally posted by drieg
...
I tried v1.5.1 and v1.5.2 and it seems that both last versions have problems with color subtitles (other than 4-2-0-5 color schema).
...

I have had similar problems:
For some DVDs, if i change the default colors subtitleworkshop selects for me, then I get both the text and outline color the same color instead of the 2 different colors I had selected.
I use muxman for the muxing (I saw another post here that this can cause color problems).
Still if I use the default colors subtitleworkshop selects for me, then edit the colors in the created .sup with SubRemap to the colors I want, then it works fine.
Note: i was unable to test this with v1.5.2 (because the bug from my previous post).


Thanx,
Erasmus.

[CoNS]

Originally posted by CoNS
When loading a custom background pic in NTSC mode it looks like there's something wrong with the aspect ratio - like the pic is too "tall"? At least that has been the case with the last couples of NTSC discs I've edited. With the last disc, I loaded it into two different software players, which both said that the aspect ratio was exactly 16:9. The picture looked normal in the soft players but stretched vertically in SC? I've done some more testing, and I've experiencing this problem with both PAL and NTSC discs.

The software player I'm talking about and which I also use to capture the background pic, which is shown as vertically stretched in SC, is the preview function in PgcEdit. I've asked the author of the program, r0lz about this issue here (scroll down to check his answer): http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=623694#post623694

[CoNS]

Paddington...?! :cool:

[Paddington]

CoNS, with respect to your problem with the background picture, thanks for talking to PGCedit about it. I've read the tread, and the incorrect scaling in SC is caused by PGCEdit which chooses to keep the original, non-scaled format. However, my screen grabber is WinDVD, and this one does scale the output picture to the correct format. Therefore, my new version offers the user an option to scale the picture after opening it (1:1, ie already scaled, or 16:9, 4:3 or 2.35:1), so you can choose the appropriate setting (maybe in the future, I can get that information from the IFO file - I will ask PGCEdit how he does it). However, I am also considering to include a DVD player option (based on DirectX or other OSS), which might resolve this problem altogether.

My next release is a bit delayed, because I am rewriting the user interface to a more common layout (with a menu), as the current preview window gets very full and has become a bit overwhelming. Especially, many of these features will probably hardly be used.

Another problem that has been mentioned is related to changing the pre-selected subtitle colors: as I haven't been able to reproduce this, I would appreciate if drieg could sent me his input files (send a private message to me...)

Finally, with respect to the problem with Persian fonts that mp3boy mentioned: this would mean a partial rewrite of the generating of my output bitmap/subtitle. However, if I could find an elegant solution, it should be able to improve the anti-aliasing as well. So instead of drawing an outline, then the anti-alias, and finally the text, I would have to start drawing the text, and then passing this text through a filter, which would add the outline and the anti-alias effect. Clearly, this would consume more time, but should solve the problem.

[Paddington]

A new version 1.5.3 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator) is available. Not everything I am looking at has been done, but the following main changes have been included:

GUI design has been altered. Preview now comes with a context menu (right-click to access) and tooltips.
Opening of NTSC movies is fixed (I hope)
Opening of background pictures allows you to specify the aspect ratio.
Formatting in MicroDVD SUB files is recognized automatically (at least the commands for bold and italic).

The next step will be changing the original outlining, so Persian fonts should work too... After that, hopefully I can add a true video preview function...
Enjoy!

[CoNS]

Wohooo! Thx Paddington, will test and report back shortly if I stumble upon anything... (like always!) :)

[Paddington]

Version 1.5.4: (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator)Fixed some small bugs, and updated the background picture function which now also reads the original screen format from the IFO settings (thanks to r0lZ and CoNS).

[CoNS]

Thanks for the new version!

How do I toggle PAL/NTSC manually in the new version (if I don't want to load an .ifo file)? Is it just me who has turned blind or is the PAL/NTSC option gone?

Also, I've tried to convince r0lZ and mpucoder (the author of MuxMan (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=92122)) to integrate a load-subtitle-colours-from-ifo function, like ReJig and SubtitleCreator does. However, they've both come up with some interesting arguments on why not to do it!!

Check out the threads here at Doom9 for both MuxMan and PgcEdit to see the details of the arguments. r0lZ thinks it too much trouble to do it because he'd have to scan the .ifo for all PGCs inside and let the user select which PGC to load the colours from. How do you do read the correct colours from an .ifo file, if it has more than one PGC (say, if the main movie is located in the second PGC?)?

r0lZ has offered to implement an alternative way to use and reuse the subtitle colours by inserting an import/export function in the next version of PgcEdit to come, whichh allows you to save the colour table as a 64 byte file only containing the 16 colours + the first "pad byte". Would you implement support for this file format in SubtitleCreator when the next version of PgcEdit is released?

EDIT: One last thing: I use Windows 2000. When I load SubtitleCreator, is displayed correctly as an active program in the process bar (next to "Start"), but when I go to the preview window in SC, the indication disappears. It re-appears after exiting the preview window :confused:

[mp3boy]

thanks for the new version, but unfortunately the problem with persian font still exists.

bugs:
- Previewing text has undwanted aliasing which make it totally differnent from actual dvd subtitle (reffer to magnified screenshot you will see more than 3 color over text making antialiasing)
- increasing SPACE value does not affect anything in text
- line spacing and height/width options are gone now.
- Text location does not movie upon the drag and drop and mouse movement, it only update the location after releasing the mouse
- Anti-aliasing is not working as it suppose to be and it is a stroke around the text.
- After increasing stroke size actual anti=aliasing will increase with it but the stroke is still one pixel width.
- when I set anti aliasing to TRANSPARENT it is actually hidden and stroke is there as a background for text. it may not be necessary to all users but it is just a small bug.
- background color is limited to text bounding box

feature request
- Preview movie with actual movie
- Action Safe and Title Safe area guide
- 16-9 and 4-3 correction, it seems its only designed for 4-3 the stretch from 16-9 make it slightly different
- Stop button during convert


Thanks for you effort on this free tool

[Paulcat]

I thought I'd try using this tool and see how it works...I have an .SRT file created and I want to be able to add it to a DVD (currently just an .AC3 file and an .M2V file).

I want to be able to make an NTSC DVD but I don't have an .IFO file to read information from (apart from your example file).

What I did was load my .SRT file, and click the preview window only to find the right portion of the menu was chopped off at the right edge of the FONT button. I can change the background picture, and edit the font, but I can't see the rest of the preview options.

I have no idea if the .SUP file I CAN save is in NTSC format or not.

Help!

p.s. I am also using Subtitle Workshop for editing, can I save in .SUP format from there withour having to convert?

[Erasmus]

i have written a guide for adding subtitles to a DVD (http://t2.technion.ac.il/~seranmiz/dvd_guides/Adding_Subtitles_to_DVD.htm) (using subtitle creator ofcourse). Please send comments to this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=92651).

@Paddington
Thanx for version 1.5.4 it works great and solves all the problems i have had with 1.5.2.
I think CoNS and Paulcat are right and the option to select NTSC is lacking when you don't load an IFO file.
Another very small matter: SC disappears from the taskbar when in preview mode also in XP (the same problem CoNS described).

@Paulcat
Subtitle Workshop does not support the .sup format and probably won't support it because it does not render subtitles.

Erasmus.

[Paulcat]

Paddington: I think I know what happens with the preview menu, I was testing it out on the PC at work (display of 800x600) where the portion of the menu that was "off-screen" was actually chopped off and inaccessible. When I ran the program at home (display of 1024x768) the full menu appeared and was fully accessable. I don't understand how the menu would actually be cut though, I think you should be able to "grab" it by the top menu bar and move it to get at the hidden parts, however, on the work PC, you can't. The work PC is Win2000, and the home one in WinXP Pro SP2 if that matters...

I still don't know how to ensure an NTSC set of subs, can I use any IFO file from any other NTSC DVD and just change the colours back to the ones I want after? In my current project, I have the option of hard-subbing the text into my DVD, but I don't want to re-encode it all if I notice mistakes or timing errors later. Or can you add an NTSC example.ifo to your software package.

Erasmus: So basically, Subtitle Workshop only lets you EDIT subtitles and save them to be created properly in other authoring software, and not actually make the proper bitmaps? Sheeit..I can use Notepad to do that!
I am using MuxMan to make a DVD with one audio and one subtitle track, I tried to get it to recognize SW's version of a Scenarist file but the error log showed it couldn't load any of the subtitles, no doubt because it was only text. MuxMan appears to work with the SUP file (from Subtitle Creator) but I don't want PAL subs and NTSC video and I can't tell what type they are..

[hej456]

... Please include a subtitle repositioning tool for sup-files in the next version if it as you said isn't very hard to implement.

I would indeed appreciate it.

[Erasmus]

@Paulcat:
I suggest you use any NTSC IFO with colors which are to your taste, use muxman to mux, then use IfoEdit to copy the colors from the IFO you used in SC to your new created IFO (as described in Step 7 of my guide (http://t2.technion.ac.il/~seranmiz/dvd_guides/Adding_Subtitles_to_DVD.htm#Step7) or in Paddington guide which comes with SC).

[Paulcat]

Originally posted by Erasmus
@Paulcat:
I suggest you use any NTSC IFO with colors which are to your taste, use muxman to mux, then use IfoEdit to copy the colors from the IFO you used in SC to your new created IFO (as described in Step 7 of my guide (http://t2.technion.ac.il/~seranmiz/dvd_guides/Adding_Subtitles_to_DVD.htm#Step7) or in Paddington guide which comes with SC).

I made a first attempt without using an IFO file, and it appears that they defaulted to PAL! MuxMan seemed to work with them, it's just that they displayed practically off-screen (in Blue no less). I kept that IFO to use in future efforts with Subtitle Creator to ensure ntsc output, however, when I do, there seem to be no colours, my only options being white, black and grey even if I choose a new colour from the palette in Subtitle Creator.

I guess my question would be: is there no "default" colour palette created when MuxMan creates my dvd files? And, if not, how can I create one instead of having to use one from some OTHER IFO file (THEY abviously have one!).

If Subtitle Creator let me select ntsc or pal somewhere, I could use his example IFO file, since I only want a basic colour (like yellow or green, and black for the outline). (PADDINGTON: How about an NTSC example IFO in your next release!!!) OR, can I copy the colours from the PAL example IFO and use my IFO to ensure NTSC output?

Also, when MuxMan creates the IFO files, are there any colours in it or are they, as it would seem, black, white and grey?

[CoNS]

Paddington, please see this post (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=636536#post636536) about the new "PGC color lookup table" file introduced by r0lZ.

I really hope that r0lZ' .CLB file format can become a standard for easy importing/exporting of subtitle colours in both PgcEdit, MuxMan and last but not least SubtitleCreator. Whaddayathink, m8?

[Paulcat]

There is some sort of problem with Subtitle Creator. I created subtitles for a DVD with the following colour scheme

Colour 00, BLACK
Colour 01, WHITE
Colour 02, YELLOW
Colour 03, RED

These were the first 4 colours in Subtitle Creator's palette (imported from an IFO that I modified with the Hex editor in IFOEdit, only the first 4 colours were used.)

I used Subtitle Creator to use the colours in this way:

Background, Colour 01, WHITE, Transparent
Text, Colour 02, YELLOW
Border, Colour 00, BLACK
Anti-Alias, Colour 00, BLACK, Transparent

This SHOULD have resulted in YELLOW titles with a BLACK border (which is how it looked in the SC preview screen). Instead what I got was fully BLACK titles. When I opened my IFO file with IFOEdit and changed colour 00 to YELLOW, I got YELLOW subtitles...with a YELLOW border (really hard on the eyes!).

The border colour seems to be correct (I selected colour 00, and it showed black when 00 was black, and yellow when 00 was yellow), but the text colour is messed up (I selected colour 02, but it seems to have mapped colour 00 instead, because it was black when colour 02 was yellow, and yellow when colour 00 was yellow)

If SC is mapping border and text colour to the SAME colour, it would be nice to have this corrected!

(I know I'm sounding a bit demanding, especially of someone who is giving away the program for free, but I'm more frustrated than anything, it's taken ages to figure out what the hell was happening!)

I could make the border transparent, but that would involve yet another remuxing and testing of subs, and quite honestly, I'm too fed up to do it right now, and the weather is too nice to sit at this pc any longer. Besides, the border is a necessity to keep the subs distinct against the video backdrop.

Paddington, if you read this, please help me out.

[Paulcat]

I made another subtitling attempt after the last one. My colour palette was:

Colour 00, YELLOW
Colour 01, WHITE
Colour 02, BLACK
Colour 03, GREY

I created the subtitles as follows:

Background, 01-White, Transparent
Text, 00-Yellow
Border, 00-Yellow, Transparent
Anti-Alias, Black

The resulting subtitles from this encoding were yellow text and no border. The transparency aspect of Subtitle Creator seems to work fine, but the colours of the border and main text seem to be encoded the same, regardless of how you select them in the display screen. Turning off the border and using the AA isn't really sufficient to make the text stand out, especially against a light background.

So it seems both text and border are being encoded with the same colour value.

Anyone else run into this problem?

[Paulcat]

Drieg seems to be correct, you can do whatever you want with the subtitles EXCEPT change from the default colour scheme of 04 for background, 02 for text, 00 for border and 05 for anti-aliasing.

I tried it with those default and my subs were fine. As long as you change colours 04, 02, 00 and 05 with IFOEdit after you have done your multiplexing (e.g. text colour to YELLOW!) it seems to be fine.

Someone get a can of Raid(tm)...

[ozzii]

Hi!

I am a new and I've got a question (maybe stupid).
How I can do to have a readable subtitle. When I do a subtitle and convert it and mux it, I didn't have the color that I put in SubtitleCreator.
When I copy and past the color for the original IFO I didn't have the good color :(

How I can do to have the good color.

Thanks in advance

[Paddington]

Sorry guys that the new release (https://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/) took some time, but I hope it is worth your wait. The main new feature, although not completely to my satisfaction yet, is that you can now preview the DVD too if you have DirectX installed (and you don't have another DirectX program running at the same time, like DVDShrink), thanks to NETmaster's open source DVD project (http://www.codeproject.com/cs/media/directshownet.asp). Although it doesn't display the subtitle on the movie yet (I don't know how to write on the DVD screen - probably needs something like DirectDraw...), you can preview the movie with the subtitles in the title bar (and in the bottom Edit window). And if you stop the movie, you see Ashley Judd again, and you can reposition the subtitle window. Finally, if you pause the movie, you can select a subtitle and press "J" to jump to it (actually, 2 seconds before, so the DirectX has some time to switch). Of course, NETmaster also provided functions to see the main menu and title menu (if any), and move to the next/previous chapter.

The following sequence works best for me:

Open a subtitle file
Open the (largest) IFO file for the color palette (always selected from PGC1).
I normally first use the advanced subtitle synchronization feature to synchronize with one of the existing subtitles.
If the IFO file you've opened is in the same directory as the VOB files, than you can open the preview window and press play. After some seconds, depending on the speed of your PC, it should start displaying the movie.
After you are satisfied that the timing is OK, take a good look at the positioning of the movie, stop the movie and position the subtitle.


I've also fixed some bugs:

Changing subtitle colors to non-default values should be OK now. The problem that [B]Paulcat[\B] experienced was due to the following: First, if the color was transparent, I wouldn't write it (faster), and SC would use the background color, which I assumed was transparent. Second, I would first write the subtitles to a bitmap, and then decode the bitmap to the SUP format by mapping the BLUE value of each color to the appropriate IFO color. However, if you are using YELLOW as an alternative color, it's BLUE value is the same as BLACK, i.e. 0, so I would decode it incorrectly to BLACK too. To fix this, I now make sure that, when reading an IFO, the BLUE value is unique, so it shouldn't cause any problems anymore. Paulcat, sorry about that, and please give it another go...
PAL/NTSC switch is visible again (in the Preview window's context menu)
The examples directory now also contains an NTSC.IFO file, with the same color palette as the PAL one (BTW, [B]CoNS[\B]I always read the color palette in PGC1).
The SC window doesn't disappear anymore (it was a feature that I removed, as it caused too much confusion).
Anti-aliasing is a fixed value, and no longer depends on the outline width.
Automatic line wrapping has been improved - not perfect yet, but I am getting there.
When you reposition the subtitle window, you now can see it when dragging.


Enjoy, and you know where to find me if you have a bug ;-)

[CoNS]

Nice! :) Will test when I get home from work.

What do you think about my suggestion about implementing an import/export feature for subtitle colours in r0lZ' file format? As I described in a reply some posts above this one...

You could also include a .clb file in your examples directory along with the example .ifo files, which would make it faster to copy the colours to the final disc using PgcEdit.

[Paulcat]

Paddington: Thanks for the bugfix, SC is one of the few programs that will remain on my HD for a long time. I will try again and see if everything works, it was nearly 100% last time. If I can select all the colours I want, then thats all I need. Unless you want to add the ability to move the start time of individual subtitles back and forth to improve synchronicity... :-)

Paul

[CoNS]

Ok, I've done a little bit of testing. I like the feel of the DVD preview. Good job. You're right, it would be very, very nice to have the subs rendered realtime on the video, hope you solve this issue! :) Found a bug: Before loading/opening a disc, you are able to press play button, which causes the program to crash (Windows 2000)

Still can't find the option to change NTSC/PAL?

Also, I haven't burned a disc yet with subs from SC 1.6 and tested in my standalone, but in SC and in my software player, the new antialiasing doesn't look as good as in the old version. Not as smooth, more edgy IMHO. I used to set the font to Arial regular 20pt with outline 3, and the old version would produce subs that looked as good as or sometimes even better than the original subtitles on the disc. But not anymore... :confused:

One last thing (minor detail): You've changed the font in the panel in the preview window to a smaller font/size, including the subtitle window to the right. In this window, however, the bottom of each line is cut slightly off so that you can't see the lower part of letters which go under the font baseline (like "g", "j", "q" etc.)

[Paddington]

I've just updated the previous version to v1.6.1 to address the bugs CoNS mentioned: PAL/NTSC menu preview in the context window (it worked also in the previous version, but only if you removed the IFO file from the Examples directory). And the Play button crashing the program (I tested it with a DVD in my drive, and it automatically started playing the DVD - now, I've made it so you first need to open a valid IFO file).

Wrt your remark about the quality of the anti-aliasing being different - I am very surprised. Previously, AA would be 50% of outline width. The current version uses 1.5F fixed value, so if you use 3F, it should be identical!

About your request to open the CLB file: hmmm, I am not very interested in that, as I am not using PGCedit a lot (I am not interested in keeping the menus, but just the movie with the new subtitle. If I want to see the menu, I will play the original one). Maybe if the clb file would reside in the same directory as the subtitle, having a fixed predetermined name, it would be little effort to read it automatically (if it's there, I read it) but I don't want to make a dedicated GUI load button for it (where would I leave it?).

Another question: wrt to the repositioning of original subtitles, does anyone have a suggestion where to put that feature?

[hej456]

"Another question: wrt to the repositioning of original subtitles, does anyone have a suggestion where to put that feature?"

Thank you so much for considering this.

How about a button in the files section named Open SUP - and if you open a .sup file you can't open a text-based subtitle at the same time... That way you can maybe make a preview window of the .sup subtitles on a PAL/NTSC background and position them where you like...

No other program have this nice feature, and during the last years I have talked to many people who have searched for a feature like this.

Thanks

[CoNS]

Originally posted by Paddington
I've just updated the previous version to v1.6.1 to address the bugs CoNS mentionedThx. :) BTW, did you find a way to solve the issue with cutting the lower part of letters under the font baseline in the subtitle window to the right?Originally posted by Paddington
And the Play button crashing the program (I tested it with a DVD in my drive, and it automatically started playing the DVD - now, I've made it so you first need to open a valid IFO file).Ahh, ok, that's why it was clickable even though no ifo was loaded. When I tested it, I didn't have a disc in my drive. I rarely do, I usually have the DVD files on my harddisk only before burning.Originally posted by Paddington
Wrt your remark about the quality of the anti-aliasing being different - I am very surprised. Previously, AA would be 50% of outline width. The current version uses 1.5F fixed value, so if you use 3F, it should be identical!Ok, I'll do some more testing on this. What does "F" mean (in "1.5F" and "3F")? Which settings would I use in SC v1.6.x to create the same looking subs that I did in SC v1.5.x, if I then used Arial regular 20pt with outline 3?Originally posted by Paddington
About your request to open the CLB file: hmmm, I am not very interested in that, as I am not using PGCedit a lot (I am not interested in keeping the menus, but just the movie with the new subtitle. If I want to see the menu, I will play the original one).But in your case you'll still need to give the newly muxed DVD the right colours? The only free authoring program that allows you to load ifo subtitle colours (for example from SC) is ReJig, which is no longer supported by the author, and which has some known issues in the muxing engine. MuxMan and IfoEdit can't do it. So you'd still need to use a program IfoEdit or PgcEdit to copy the subtitle colours to the new DVD if these programs are used. PgcEdit is in many ways the successor to IfoEdit, and is certainly a tool of the new generation used by many, many users already....

Anyway, the issue is not so urgent anymore as I got r0lZ to implement a feature for importing subtitle colours from separate ifo files (PGC 1), so it'll only be a problem when the colours are located in PGC 2+.Originally posted by Paddington
Maybe if the clb file would reside in the same directory as the subtitle, having a fixed predetermined name, it would be little effort to read it automatically (if it's there, I read it) but I don't want to make a dedicated GUI load button for it (where would I leave it?).Hmmm, wouldn't an autoread function conflict with the cases where you load in ifo manually? Not a pretty solution, anyway! If you should put an "Import sub colours from .clb file" in the GUI as it is now, it should probably reside in the main window in first tab below the "Load IFO" button?

But actually, as you're experiencing more and more problems with fitting options and buttons into the program due to lack of space, you should maybe consider rearranging the GUI, so that you make an "ordinary" application look and feel with a window which has a menu line and perhaps even an icon line and then the main part of the program below. Like VobBlanker, PgcEdit, Srt2Sup etc... You could then put many of the options in the menu line or even in an options submenu.

[Paulcat]

CoNs: I noticed the same effect with the subtitles, I use the same font and pitch as you, and they looked a bit more jagged to me now than before. What if you set your AA colour to the same as your text colour?

Paddington: What might be an idea would be to move the video type (PAL/NTSC), aspect ratio and subtitle display (colour/font) settings to a more global menu, perhaps in the main menu, maybe even as the first tab instead of "create SUP". You could automatically save these to a log file which is read on program startup, allowing us to keep the same settings (in general I would think that once we get the settings the way we want, we won't be changing them too often :-) )
THEN, we could use the read IFO option just to import the colour palette from an IFO (you could even call the option IMPORT PALETTE, to make it absolutely clear :-) )
You could also display the main video settings in the bottom left of the main menu (adjacent to the display you have of the subtitle font and colour), then we could see NTSC 720x480 Letterbox before we click the START option.
If you move the font/colour options out of the preview window, it will leave you more space for other options. Conceivably, you could remove the scrolling list of subtitles from the right of the preview window and place it below the screen display window, combining the toggling of individual titles with the editing function. Being able to edit the timing would be nice too (since I think that's where you seem to be headed...a full blown editor as opposed to a simple program that just makes dvd files).

Just some (!) suggestions.

Oh, yeah, I opened the display window here at work (screen resolution of 800x600) and the preview window is chopped again. Perhaps you could have a warning somewhere to have a minimum desktop resolution of 1024x768 for the preview window, since it can't be resized...

[Paddington]

Originally posted by CoNS
Ok, I'll do some more testing on this. What does "F" mean (in "1.5" and "3")? Which settings would I use in SC v1.6.x to create the same looking subs that I did in SC v1.5.x, if I then used Arial regular 20pt with outline 3?
F stands for Float (C# thing), so you can just ignore it: so you should be able to use the same as before, with outline 3... I will check my code again, using your settings, but I don't see know how my little code chnage could influence the output.

But in your case you'll still need to give the newly muxed DVD the right colours? ... PgcEdit is in many ways the successor to IfoEdit, and is certainly a tool of the new generation used by many, many users already....
Maybe I should see how to author a new DVD with PgcEdit - is it also faster than IfoEdit - but it has many features I normally don't use.

But actually, as you're experiencing more and more problems with fitting options and buttons into the program due to lack of space, you should maybe consider rearranging the GUI, so that you make an "ordinary" application look and feel with a window which has a menu line and perhaps even an icon line and then the main part of the program below. Like VobBlanker, PgcEdit, Srt2Sup etc... You could then put many of the options in the menu line or even in an options submenu.
Actually, I already had something like that - in C#, it's very easy to add, although I would need to become creative and find some cool toolbar pictures ;-) - but I've removed them when I started working on the DVD preview capability, so I don't have to change too many things at once. However, NETmaster's DVD code gave me some ideas to improve the GUI functionality, so that's good.

[Paddington]

Originally posted by Paulcat
Paddington: What might be an idea would be to move the video type (PAL/NTSC), aspect ratio and subtitle display (colour/font) settings to a more global menu, perhaps in the main menu, maybe even as the first tab instead of "create SUP". You could automatically save these to a log file which is read on program startup, allowing us to keep the same settings (in general I would think that once we get the settings the way we want, we won't be changing them too often :-) ) THEN, we could use the read IFO option just to import the colour palette from an IFO (you could even call the option IMPORT PALETTE, to make it absolutely clear :-) )

I don't know if you've noticed, but in the main program directory is a settings file, 'SubtitleCreatorProfiles.xml', which allows you to create different profiles (what a surprise): three are already created, but there shouldn't be a limit on the number, and it allows you to define your default font, position, outline, stretching, etc. It would make sense to include your preferred settings in there for the most common screen version you encounter. Unfortunately, you have to manually edit the xml file, but you can do that with any editor (just make sure that you save a copy of the original, because my error handling is not very good - opening the file in IE should also show you if there are any problems).

BTW, didn't you once ask about the space option: it only works when you have a spacing between different font styles, e.g. regular and italics, to correct the distance used for the space, which seems to work differently for every font family.

About the anti-aliasing, below you will find three different versions: so tell me, which has your preference?
http://img168.exs.cx/img168/281/aa152rj.png
AA width of 1.5 (currently implemented)
http://img168.exs.cx/img168/3742/aa1757kc.png
AA width of 1.75
http://img133.exs.cx/img133/8448/aa201dw.png
AA width of 2.0

And thanks for your suggestions about the GUI!

[CoNS]

Originally posted by Paddington
Maybe I should see how to author a new DVD with PgcEdit - is it also faster than IfoEdit - but it has many features I normally don't use.AFAIK you can't author a DVD with PgcEdit. I prefer MuxMan by mpucoder, it has a very easy-to-use GUI with slightly more options than IfoEdit (and ReJig, which is very similar to the IfoEdit GUI, even though the muxing engine is different).

The anti-aliasing (AA) issue

I can see a remarkable difference with all font settings. The AA is much nicer in v1.5.x. This (http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc161.png) is a screen capture from v1.6.1 (Arial regular 22pt with outline 3). And here (http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc154.png) is a screen capture from v1.5.4 with the exact same settings. Try testing it yourself with v1.5.4 vs. v1.6.1 where you use the same font/outline settings in both versions... I'm with Paulcat: Give us back the v1.5.4 code in this matter!! :D Please!

About the AA "F" value, which you displayed in your screen capture examples: Could it be an idea to let the user select the desired value?

A few bugs in v1.6.1

Also, found a couple of other bugs in v1.6.1: The vertical positioning is a bit messed up. The target area doesn't always react on a change of this setting. For example, look at the above mentioned screen capture from v1.6.1. It says position 221 even though it's more like 350 or 355. If I click "Ok" in the preview window and click "Preview" again, the target area box has now moved to the correct position after the new value. Also I have some problems with the drag and drop function of the target area box in v1.6.1, it doesn't seem to work.

When I try to edit the subtitle text and click "Update", I get this (http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc161error.png) error in v1.6.1. The same editing works fine w/o error in v1.5.4.

The all subtitles/current subtitles setting and changing font settings

Also (probably present in all versions), I have noticed that sometimes when I click "Font" to change the font settings, the changes are just ignored by the program. Nothing happens. I found out it's because I previously selected the current subtitle for editing, and didn't change it back to all subtitles in the content menu. This system with selecting all or current subtitles is a bit awkward IMHO.

Sup files editing/displaying

About the suggestions regarding repositioning in sup files: It would be great to have some functions to edit settings in sup files. It should probably be in a new menu/tab as suggested by paulcat, as it doesn't have anything to do with the creation of sup files from a text format, won't you say? I also really miss a tool that can load a sup file and display the bitmap subs combined with a loaded set of ifo colours or an editable colour pallette.

You could also implement the functions of SubtitleRemap (http://dvd.box.sk/index.php?pid=soft&prj=info&pol=0&plat=SupRemap) by Gandalf, the author of Srt2sup. SubtitleRemap is no longer developed or supported, but it has a few nice options to change the mapping of the colours within a sup file etc. Here's the official homepage (http://www.shipleys.eclipse.co.uk/supremap.htm). And perhaps also some of the features from Kaspareks DVD Subtitle Tools (http://web.quick.cz/FKasparek/Software/DVD/DVDSupTools.htm). Very nice and powerful sup tools, but no GUI!

GUI improvements

In all, I think you should really consider changing the basic GUI of the program even though it'll take you a lot of time to do... The preview window in SC has turned out to be the main window IMO. You could build up the program around this window. You could remove the subtitle display to the right and expand the display of the text subs at the bottom and use this only, like suggested by another user above.

And then add a normal menu line (and perhaps an icon line) with normal submenus/drop down menus (the usual Windows style) with all the options to load a subtitle file, load ifo file, change the bitmap settings, background picture etc. (i.e. replace a lot of the buttons with drop down menus/icons). Then you can fit it all into one window with nice menus at the top and the content split between the background picture/dvd playback and a scrolldown inner window with the text subtitles at the bottom. And thus you can reduce the width to 720 pixels + borders, so it can be used in resolution of 800x600...

BTW, about the icons and your creativity (!): Usually icons in an icon line at the top are simply shortcuts to menu functions. You don't neccessarily have to add icons - you can add an icon later? There should be various icon libraries (in dll files etc.) with standard Windows-like icons, which you can use if you want...

A BIG thank you

Thanks again for all your work with this nice program, and for sharing it. It's very much appreciated :)

EDIT: Sorry for the long post...! I've now put some headlines into the text to make it easier to overlook!

[Paulcat]

Paddington: The AA setting of 1.5 looks much better than the ones at 1.75 and 2.0, HOWEVER, if you look at the two bitmaps provided by CoNs, the ones done on version 1.5.4 look much better than the ones done on 1.6.1, the new improved version of SC seems to have a more jagged AA than the previous one, even if the new AA is a more correct method.

I also agree that the preview screen is the main screen, and hell, one menu is better than two, so why not make it the main menu screen as well? A set of buttons across the top or bottom, or a set of pulldown menus under the title bar might also be the way to go. Then you could put the video load/playback buttons directly under the video screen. BTW, what video formats can SC open? Anything that I can open in Direct Show?
But please, return the AA to way it was before. IMHO, it does look a lot better!

And no it was not me who inquired about the spacing option, although now I know why it had no effect when I played with it!

I hadn't noticed the profiles (I'm lazy), perhaps a load/save settings option for myself and the other motivationally challenged people out there. (And yet I'm making subtitles, how challenged is THAT? :-) )

Paul

p.s. The tails of certain letters are still amputated in the subtitle selection window on the right. Not a huge problem for me, as I can read and can generally tell what the sentances are, but it is a cosmetic thing you could look at..though I don't know how you find the time..!

[Paddington]

Originally posted by CoNS
The anti-aliasing (AA) issue

I can see a remarkable difference with all font settings. The AA is much nicer in v1.5.x. This (http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc161.png) is a screen capture from v1.6.1 (Arial regular 22pt with outline 3). And here (http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/sc154.png) is a screen capture from v1.5.4 with the exact same settings. Try testing it yourself with v1.5.4 vs. v1.6.1 where you use the same font/outline settings in both versions... I'm with Paulcat: Give us back the v1.5.4 code in this matter!! :D Please!

About the AA "F" value, which you displayed in your screen capture examples: Could it be an idea to let the user select the desired value?
[/B]
Ah ha, now I understand what you are talking about - thanks for showing the pictures (BTW, did you know that if you post your images to ImageShack (http://www.imageshack.ws/), you can see them inline in the message)! The confusion is based on mp3boy's (I think) request to not use full anti-aliasing in the preview anymore, which I did in the new version, as it cannot be realized by the DVD output anyways. As you may know, the DVD has only four colors available for generating subtitles, not the thousands you have on your PC. So with one color for the background, one for text, and one for outline, I have only one color left for all anti-aliasing, and the pictures I showed you are created using srt2sup's sup import utility.

If you prefer, I can have the preview show the old image quality again, but just realize that this doesn't influence the output quality!

The all subtitles/current subtitles setting and changing font settings
The reason for the switching is so you can use the font and positioning settings in both cases: for example, if you are editing the current subtitle, you can select text in the edit subtitle box, and change the font of the selected text using the font menu.

Sup files editing/displaying
Displaying the sup using the currently selected IFO is already implemented in the advanced synchronization feature (BTW, do you use this? I know there is still a small bug in there, but you haven't told me about it yet ;-). But it doens't allow you to change anything yet. What kind of features would you be looking for? If they are as easy as repositioning, I might do them...

GUI improvements
OK, I will have another go at it, although I am pretty sure it will not fit in 800x600: PAL height is 576, so it would only leave me with 24 pixels below the movie. The only way to remain within that size is to separate the preview window from the editing window...

[CoNS]

Originally posted by Paddington
did you know that if you post your images to ImageShack (http://www.imageshack.ws/), you can see them inline in the messageThey don't need approval from a moderator, then? The approval usually takes some time, which is why I've been posting direct links to the images instead.

Originally posted by Paddington
If you prefer, I can have the preview show the old image quality again, but just realize that this doesn't influence the output qualityOk, thanx for explaining the AA issue. I'll create some sups with both v1.6.1 and v1.5.4 and burn them to a DVD and test in my standalone... I'll let you know my testing results (rest asured!). The old image quality in the SC preview looked nicer, but if there's a logical reason for changing it, then I guess we can live with it! :)Originally posted by Paddington
[Displaying the sup using the currently selected IFO is already implemented in the advanced synchronization featureIt would be nice to be able to 1) control the colours you use to display the bitmap subs, i.e. load an ifo for this where the bitmap subs are displayed exactly with these colours and a function to edit the colour pallette. And 2) to change which 4 of the 16 ifo colours are used for the subs, i.e. remap the subs like SubtitleRemap allows you to do.Originally posted by Paddington
OK, I will have another go at it, although I am pretty sure it will not fit in 800x600: PAL height is 576, so it would only leave me with 24 pixels below the movie. The only way to remain within that size is to separate the preview window from the editing window...Yep that could be an option. However, I agree with you - it's impossible to get to fit into 800x600. The problem is that even with 1024x768, which is a very common screen resolution out there, the preview window is too compact now, as it is in v1.6.1 etc. It's too high and too wide for this resolution IMO. I'm thinking something like this (http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/scgui.png), perhaps? (with extras icons? And the checkboxes for each subtitle line. You can then put all the various settings into the dropdown menus, along with normal menu functions to change background, import text subtitles, .sup, .ifo and .clb files etc.)

BTW, about the issue with chopped off letters in the current subtitle window to the right in the preview window, here (http://home25.inet.tele.dk/dvdkat/scgui.png) is an example. Notice the letters "g", "y" etc.

[Paulcat]

I was wondering after selecting the background picture for either PAL or NTSC, when you change the profile from 4:3 to 16:9 or 2.25:1, the picture still fills the preview window. I may be mistaken in thinking the the previous versions resized the picture to make the preview window more closely resemble the final output, but if it didn't, how about different JPG's for different aspect ratios? I think it would be fairly simple, even if you take a full size one and crop bits off of it or create false "black bars" to represent the letterboxing. I realize we can add our own backgrounds, but automatically changing from say PAL4-3.jpg to PAL16-9.jpg to PAL225-1.jpg OR adding the option to the profile to load a particular background image for a particular AR would ne nice.
I also noticed the "Anamorphic" option seems to be gone, which never really mattered to me in any case..

As for the AA, if the current version (which looks worse) is the way the subs are displayed on the DVD, then we should keep it that way, but if not, maybe return the AA to the way it looked before. No one will want to use SC if they think the final result will be full of "jaggies"!

I just re-read a few prior posts here, am I to understand that even if the IFO has a palette of 16 colours, the dvd can only use four of them for the subs, regardless of how many of the 16 colours we choose to use in SC? That doesn't make sense to me, but if it is the case, then assigning 10 different colours for text for various speakers for example would not work, correct?

[Paddington]

Originally posted by Paulcat
As for the AA, if the current version (which looks worse) is the way the subs are displayed on the DVD, then we should keep it that way, but if not, maybe return the AA to the way it looked before. No one will want to use SC if they think the final result will be full of "jaggies"!
You have to realize, though, that you watch subtitles on a TV from a distance, so you won't notice the jaggies as much. Having said that, I am working on an improved version to compensate a bit better for these jaggies...

I just re-read a few prior posts here, am I to understand that even if the IFO has a palette of 16 colours, the dvd can only use four of them for the subs, regardless of how many of the 16 colours we choose to use in SC? That doesn't make sense to me, but if it is the case, then assigning 10 different colours for text for various speakers for example would not work, correct?
Well, yes and no: let me be a bit more precise. For any subtitle, you can only use for colors (background/foreground/outline/aa, e.g. transparent grey/white/black/silver). However, for the next subtitle, you could use a different set of colors (e.g. transp. grey/yellow/black/silver), although SC doesn't allow you to set those yet. When you make subtitles for the hearing impaired, you often see two colors on the screen for two speakers: this means that they remove the AA, and use the AA color as the foreground color for the second speaker.

BTW CoNS, I am also trying to add the ListView control you have so nicely drawn! Thanks for that (although it's a very difficult control to manage, I must say - I still have to determine how I can programmatically select items or open a edit box).

[CoNS]

Originally posted by Paddington
You have to realize, though, that you watch subtitles on a TV from a distance, so you won't notice the jaggies as much. Having said that, I am working on an improved version to compensate a bit better for these jaggies...Now I'm confused :confused: I thought that the changes made to the AA routine in v1.6.x was only visible in the preview in SC, whereas the outputted subs in the sup file would be identical to the subs outputted from v1.5.x? Please elaborate...

[Paddington]

Originally posted by CoNS
Now I'm confused :confused: I thought that the changes made to the AA routine in v1.6.x was only visible in the preview in SC, whereas the outputted subs in the sup file would be identical to the subs outputted from v1.5.x? Please elaborate...
OK, here is the extended version: Currently, I convert a text string to a 'path', so "Hello world" becomes a path, where each letter is taken separately (that's the way the default MS Graphics Device Interface GDI+ is created). Then I create a bitmap which consists of the background color. Next, I write the outline without the path, i.e. they do not change the layout of the letters, followed by a thinner AA-line on top, also without the path. This produces some AA effects that you see in the output sup. Finally, I write the foreground text within the path. In the current implementation, that's what you see in the preview as well, and that's why it looks more jagged: I only have one color to fill the jaggies, and I only do it between the outline and the foreground color.

There are two problems with this approach: first, you won't have any AA effects between the background and the outline. I could alleviate this, of course, by starting drawing an AA path with width 6.5, and outline of width 5, and another AA with width 1.5.

The second problem turns up when writing fonts like Persian, which has letters that are connected continuously. If I would only write the foreground, that would be OK, but as I also write an outline, the GDI+ drawing routines coming with MS draw this around each individual letter, thereby destroying the connection between letters. So I have to create a special filter that uses the foreground text path only, adds an outline to the foreground text (so presumably, the space between letters is filled), and adds an AA effect to it. Because this is not part of the GDI+, it might take a bit longer, but should lead to an improved output. And that's what I am working on.
Hopefully, this resolved the confusion...

[Paulcat]

Paddington:

So what you are saying is that with a palette of 16 colours, you can only use 4 of them at any given time. This leads to another question, if the background and AA are rendered transparent, could you not have text with 3 different colours and a black border in the same title?

It seems to me that any "transparent" colour is also a non-existant colour, much like the majority of space in the bitmap that is outside of the subtitle "area"...I am assuming that the final bitmap has bytes ranging from 00 to 0f to indicate which of the 16 colours is used for that pixel, what is used for the blank spaces or transparent colours? 10 perhaps? (Also, is the bitmap the full size of the video image i.e. 720x480/576 or is it the size of the user defined window with co-ordinates to tell the player where the window is?)

As for the Persian font giving you such trouble, is there no font in that language with unconnected letters? There are tons of fonts for english letters, some connected and some not..you'd think there would be the same choices with Persian..

I am still confused about the AA issue also, if the output is the same in versions 1.5.x and 1.6.x then the only difference is that the preview window in 1.6.x reflects the final product more accurately, correct? If so, that's fine, but it still looks uglier than before, and some users may not realize that..

Is the picture in the preview window supposed to get resized when you change the aspect ratio?

CoNs:

I like that layout, nice and clean!

[CoNS]

Originally posted by Paulcat
I am still confused about the AA issue also, if the output is the same in versions 1.5.x and 1.6.x then the only difference is that the preview window in 1.6.x reflects the final product more accurately, correct? If so, that's fine, but it still looks uglier than before, and some users may not realize that..My point exactly. I'm currently using SC v1.5.4 instead of v1.6.x so that I'm certain to get the subs I want... :)

[Paddington]

Paulcat, with respect to the subtitling format, your assumptions, although reasonable, are not correct. It is true that the subtitles get stored as a 'picture', but it would be more correct to call it a run-length encoded bitstream. Each pixel is represented with two bits (00,01,10,11), which each map to one of the 16 colors in the palette (resulting in two bytes). Additionally, each subtitle specifies which of these colors is transparent (e.g. 0xFFF0 means that only the last color is transparent - therefore, it really is a color too, and you have only three colors left for the sub). To complicate things further, the bits preceding the two 'color' bits indicate the run-length, i.e. they tell you how many pixels have the same color. However, it gets even worse: the even and odd rows are separated into two buffers, surrounded by preamble and all kinds of additional information as where to put the subtitle, when, etc. And there are many idiosyncracies in there as well, as not all starting positions are possible (they have to be either even or odd, I can't remember exactly anymore).

Furthermore, with respect to image size, some subtitles cover the whole screen, some, like mine, only the part that contains information (so their size is smaller).

Wrt the output of SC1.6 vs 1.5.4 - if you use the default settings to generate a sup for both versions, the outputs should be identical to the bit. You can also test it with srt2sup's SUP import utility, which will convert the outputs to a bitmap that's easier to inspect.

Wrt the preview window - thanks to CoNS link to r0lZ (PgcEdit), I now understand how frames are stored within a DVD (also this is not straightforward). How accurately the preview represents the actual subtitle positions depends heavily on the program you use for a screen capture. Although I use WinDVD until recently, I don't trust is very much - on my PC, it positions all subtitles (not only mine) on a different location than my hardware DVD player does. My player, however, does the same as my SC1.6 preview function, so who's is right. WinDVD's output is already corrected for anamorphic, and I am not sure if they do this correctly... Therefore, more recently, I switched to PgcEdit for this, although I currently only use the DVD preview capability of SC1.6...

[CoNS]

Originally posted by Paddington
Wrt the output of SC1.6 vs 1.5.4 - if you use the default settings to generate a sup for both versions, the outputs should be identical to the bit. You can also test it with srt2sup's SUP import utility, which will convert the outputs to a bitmap that's easier to inspect.Thanks for clarifying this. I'll try to make two sets of example subs with my preferred settings (Arial regular 20-22pt, outline size 3, SC default colours) and compare them using srt2sup as you suggested. :)

IF you sometime in the future implement some kind of advanced sup editing support, it would be great to have a feature to export subtitle bitmap from a sup file to one or more bmp file(s)...!

How's the development of the GUI coming along, btw? Have you decided to go for a radical change?

[Paulcat]

Paddington: Wow! It sounds to me that whoever designed the DVD spec to begin with really didn't choose simplicity! So for each title, you select the four colours you are using, which are transparent and then use two bits to represent each.. The more I learn about this, the more I seem to think there should be a much better way of doing things. At least you don't need to cover the entire screen for a few characters of text, that, at least, makes sense. Can you change the size or position of the "bitmap" for each subtitle or do you have to go with the size as relates to the subtitle area as defined in SC? (i.e. wherever you have your background colour).
Thanks for all your hard work, BTW, it is quite a good program!

[Paddington]

The new GUI is slowly moving along - I first want to cleanup the preview window, before I radically change the layout.

Exporting sup to bitmap will be easy - the function has already been written, but there is no room for it on the GUI.

And indeed, each subtitle also contains the position and width of the subtitle bounding box, so you can override all of these in principle for each sub separately. In a previous post, someone requested to make the subtitle position separate from the bounding box (in order to cover the original, hard-coded subtitles), which is possible, but which is less easy to implement in my code.

[CoNS]

Sound good, can't wait to see the result! :) So you go for a solution where the preview window is a part of the main program window?

If you remove a lot of the buttons and turn them into functions to be selected from the dropdown menu at the top, you could implement the "Save as SUP" button (the selecting of the output file/path) in the main "Process" (or "Start") button so that you get the file dialog window as the first thing when you click this button...?

BTW, I did some thourough testing on the AA issue. And you're right. The output is exactly the same in v1.5.4 and v1.6.1 when I check in software player and standalone. Pheuw! But damn, the subs are ugly (jagged) in the preview window in SC v1.6.1. Might cause some new potential users to run away screaming without even trying it on a final disc?!

(The testing of the AA thingy took some time as it turned out that the default settings had been changed in v1.6.1 compared to v1.5.4! Default font size is now 18 (22 in v1.5.4) and default vertical position and the default colours have been changed, too. :mad: ... :p)

[evilrad]

First, I'll complement you on this great tool. Great Job! Now here is the problem I'm facing. I can never get two different lines of subs to show up at the same time or even overlap each other in time. Example; One person starts to speak (subtitle placed at bottom of screen) and while that person is still speaking someone else begins to speak as well (subtitle at top of screen - toptitle). What happens is that the second set of subs will not appear until the first set is finished (despite the timings). So basically you can't have overlapping times (or identical times) even though I've placed the second set of subs in a different position. Is there anyway to implement this feature in the next version or is there a way to do that now that I'm not aware of? Thanks

[CoNS]

@evilrad: AFAIK only one set of subtitles can be shown at a time according to the DVD specs, so basically it won't be possible to do what you're after. I don't remember seeing the subtitle effect you describe in any studio authored DVD either?

There was a similar discussion here in the forums some time ago where a user wanted to put two versions of the same subtitles in two different languages on a DVD, so that they were displayed at the same time, at the top and at the bottom of the screen respectively. The answer to his problem was the same: It can't be done in a bitmap subtitle stream on a DVD. There are two workarounds:

1) Some software players are able to display two sets of text subtitles simultaineously.

2) You can hardcode the subtitles into the video using VirtualDub (or VirtualDubMod for mpeg2 support) or a similar program.

[Paulcat]

Paddington: I know some other forum user mentioned being able to adjust the positions of SUP files with Subtitle Creator. I also would like to see this, as it would prove especially useful in converting PAL subs to NTSC subs (as that's what I'm trying to do right now!). If the PAL subs are not full screen, adjusting the vertical placement would be all that is necessary to use them in place of NTSC subs, and not have to do any conversions.

I know you are doing other things, but it would be a nice addition in the future.

Paul

[CoNS]

Originally posted by Paulcat
it would prove especially useful in converting PAL subs to NTSC subs (as that's what I'm trying to do right now!).You'd need another tool for that, too, wouldn't you? To adjust the timecodes to match the different framerates of the two formats?

[evilrad]

Originally posted by CoNS
@evilrad: AFAIK only one set of subtitles can be shown at a time according to the DVD specs, so basically it won't be possible to do what you're after. I don't remember seeing the subtitle effect you describe in any studio authored DVD either?


Actually, I see it done in almost all anime DVDs (that's why I asked). Sometimes there are even more than 2 sets of subs, in different positions, on the screen at the same time (2 people talking & signs in the background translated). So there has to be a way to do it. If anyone finds out, let me know. Thanks

[CoNS]

Ah, ok, didn't know that. You sure they're not hardcoded into the video?

If not, in order to find out how it's done, you could try and demux the movie and take a look at the sup files, i.e. load them in the SubtitleCreator sync window or convert them to single bitmap files with a .srt file with all the time codes using Srt2sup or Kaspareks DVD Subtitle Tools (see download link in one of my above posts)...

From this you'll be able to find out more about the method and might bring you closer to being able to create the same effect in your own subs. Good luck :)

[AcidDeath]

hellow
i have some questions!

i normally make PAL dvd's from avi files
but what are the best vertical settings for a widesreen TV playing a PAL movie? what do you use, guys?

and what are the standard IFO coulors the program use?
for changing in IFOEdit, so:
coulor 0 = ?
coulor 1 = ?
coulor 3 = ?
coulor 4 = ?

and, i made a sup file in a movie, but, when playing it on TV, i sometimes can see the subtitle!
in the black box under the widescreen movie, i see a kind of white "shadow"
so i see that there have to be a subtitle, but i don't see him at all!

and my last problem: have can i save my settings or change the XML file? I can't do it, and it's very irritating changing it all the time!

thank you very much

PS: what about my english?
:D is it as bad as I think it is? Normally i speak dutch
on my exam English, i had 65% :cool:

[Paulcat]

Originally posted by CoNS
You'd need another tool for that, too, wouldn't you? To adjust the timecodes to match the different framerates of the two formats?

If I was some sort of ultra-videofreak I would slow the video back down to 23.976 fps and time-compress the audio 4%, convert the video to ntsc and rebuild the dvd...but I'm not. If the English can't tell the difference between 23.976 and 25 fps, who am I to argue. As long as the running time is unchanged, the subs and audio can be left alone...and I spend less time watching movies :-) !!!

[AcidDeath]

Originally posted by AcidDeath
hellow
i have some questions!

i normally make PAL dvd's from avi files
but what are the best vertical settings for a widesreen TV playing a PAL movie? what do you use, guys?

and what are the standard IFO coulors the program use?
for changing in IFOEdit, so:
coulor 0 = ?
coulor 1 = ?
coulor 3 = ?
coulor 4 = ?

and, i made a sup file in a movie, but, when playing it on TV, i sometimes can see the subtitle!
in the black box under the widescreen movie, i see a kind of white "shadow"
so i see that there have to be a subtitle, but i don't see him at all!

and my last problem: have can i save my settings or change the XML file? I can't do it, and it's very irritating changing it all the time!

thank you very much

PS: what about my english?
:D is it as bad as I think it is? Normally i speak dutch
on my exam English, i had 65% :cool:

anyone?? please

[hej456]

Hey Paddington, just wanted to know how long you were expecting it to take before a version which allows you to reposition the org. subs?

I am not impatient, just can't wait to test that feature... :)

Thanks for all your hard work on this fine program.

[Paddington]

Sorry to keep you waiting, but CoNS has done some beta testing for you all (THANKS AGAIN), and I didn't fix all the bugs he has found, but still wanted to give you the opportunity to test it as well. Go to here (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=120228&package_id=151984) and try the beta version if you dare.

New additions:

Added the SUP tools tab, which allows you to change an existing SUP plus preview
Change the vertical position of a subtitle in the SUP file (all subtitles or only the selected one)
Change the colors you wish to use (all or selected).
Saving of SUP to Bitmaps (bmp, png, jpg) using 4 bits per pixel
Reading SUP files for advanced synchronization now uses the new SUP reading routine, which is much faster
When no SUP is available, you can synchronize as well using the DVD preview option in the normal preview window
In the preview window, you can now search for a string (S) and repeat the search (A)
@mp3boy: I had a go at the problem you've experienced with Persian fonts. If you go to the (normal) preview window, right click on the background, and unselect 'Original rendering' (and set outline to 2), it will use a different approach to creating the outline and AA, hopefully without interrupting the ligatures between letters. Please give it a try and let me know if it works (it will look less nice at the moment, but at least I will know that I am working in the right direction)

[hej456]

Just did a little repositioning - you are my hero, nice prewiew window with great and simple features.

[hej456]

Done some testing, and once the respositioned sub turned out like this. I loaded the ifo and all. Placed the sub where I wanted it, and saved it. Then I loaded it back and got this result.
http://medlem.jubii.dk/yamada6700/screen.jpg

[hej456]

and this is from another movie also with the correct ifo loaded, the preview seems just perfect like this:

http://medlem.jubii.dk/yamada6700/screen3.jpg

but after I save, when I load the saved sup or put it on the dvd it looks wrong like this:

http://medlem.jubii.dk/yamada6700/screen2.jpg

hej456

[Paddington]

@hej456 Do you mind sending me the IFO and SUP by email (send me a private message, and I will send you my email address) so I can do some testing. Thanks!

[hej456]

PM send to Paddington, will send you the files when I get your mail.

[hej456]

Mail at your sourceforge mail.

[Paddington]

I've fixed the above bug: check out Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/).

Fixed a bug for manipulating SUP files which use a non-zero background color index.
Added shortcuts in the normal preview window (CTRL-F for finding text, CTRL-B, I, U for Bold, Italics, Underline, and CTRL-L, R, E for left, right and center alignment).

[Paulcat]

I just had a look at the new build, pretty impressive, and the layout of the preview window is much cleaner. Well done. Now only if I had some subtitling to do...

Paul

Keep up the good work!

[sharkybacsi]

I've just started to use your app, great piece of program, much better, than srt2sup.

However, i discovered a bug I think.
I read only the last two pages of the thread, sorry if it was discussed before.

I live in an Eastern-European country, so my computer uses Eastern-European text coding by default. I tried to add an italian subtitle to a dvd, and it was coded according to the Western-European character table, so some of the characters looked ugly in the preview window, as well as in notepad for example. In srt2sup I could change the character-coding, and it showed the right characters. In subtitlecreator 1.6.1 I can change the coding in the font window, but it seems to me, the app doesn't realize it, the preview window doesn't change, and when I go back to the font window, it shows the default choice (Eastern-European) again. In 1.7b4, I can't even change it, because there it shows only the default choice.
So I had to change my computer's global settings to italian, reboot, and then I was able to use the Western-European characters.
Is there a way to change the coding in subtitlecreator, did I miss a setting?

Apart from it, it's a great app, works beautifully, and quickly.

Thanks.

ps.: sorry for the long post.

[Paddington]

Version 1.8 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/) has just been released! It includes a major change of the GUI (thanks to CoNS' input :D) and it integrates the new manipulation tools to change the colors and position of existing SUPs.
http://img269.echo.cx/img269/1679/previewwindow9bc.jpg (http://www.imageshack.us)

Additionally, I have updated my documentation, as well as the homepage (http://subtitlecreator.sourceforge.net/), so check it out please.

@sharkybacsi: Did you already try to change the Regional settings (in the Control Panel) of windows?

Thanks to ImageShack for Free Image Hosting (http://www.imageshack.us)

[CoNS]

Ay Caramba!! Everybody, try out this new version by Paddington, it rocks :)

Paddington has been very doubtful about whether he should implement the new GUI or keep the old one, so please state your oppinion in a post here... :)

[hej456]

As i stated before, I just love the new manipulate option, thanks for all your hard work Paddington.

[Paulcat]

Paddington: This new version blows away the previous ones, please stay with this new GUI.

A couple of things though...is there a way to get the window to open at 1,1? I.E. with the top left corner of your window in the top left corner of the screen? (somewhere in the INI file perhaps?)

Also, when loading a background image, you have the option to change the image to suit the aspect ratio of the video you are working with. Can you put this option under a command in the title bar as well, so that we can change it without re-loading the background image?

Apart from those middling things, everything else seems to work just fine!

Oh yeah, I did notice that with more than two lines of text selected for the subtitles, sometimes the auto-wrap would reduce the font size instead of expanding the text to fit three lines. I cannot recall if this has been mentioned and corrected or not. If it has, please ignore me!

[Paddington]

Version 1.8.3 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/) has just been released. Nothing major, and mainly fixes some GUI problems that CoNS mentioned.

I've also included a Windows installer [.msi] release, which unpacks everything and creates some menus and links (to documentation, website, etc.). As I don't mess with the registry, it should uninstall cleanly. Here is an overview of the new features:

Fixed some small GUI layout problems.
Made the Manipulate SUP dialog appear more like a dialog (removed the menu, added some buttons)
Added PAL/NTSC settings to this form (right click on background)
Added links to the documentation in the Help menu.
Changed some problems with small screens (<=1024x768: which will be centered now)
@Paulcat: added your request for a menu where you can change the background settings (last item in Settings menu).
Version 1.8.3 Added a context menu, so you can insert/delete/split subtitles
Include a check on loading that the subtitles don't overlap.
Improved the GUI when switching between PAL/NTSC

[Paulcat]

Paddington, thanks for the program, and for adding the background format change to the menu. I know I was just being lazy, but there are a lot of us around!

Excellant job by the way. I couldn't program to save my life, at least not without some refresher courses (6502 assembly language anyone?), It's nice to see this contribution, I've learned a ton about subtitling in the past few months..

Paul

[Paulcat]

I see you have 1.8.4 online already!

One thing I noticed, if the background setting is NTSC, and I change the background image from 1:1 to 4:3, the image gets larger whereas if I do the same thing in PAL, the image gets smaller. I'm assuming it's supposed to get smaller...

Also, I have many files that have an AR of 2.21:1, is there a chance you can add an option for a "custom" AR?

I like how you shift the lower items up when moving to NTSC, nice touch!

Paul

[ukendt]

Paddington, I've been testing last version and it appears every 6th og so sub
(lines) is shaky (only tested with NTSC).
Is this a prob and has anyone else having it?

[Paddington]

@ukendt: Haven't heard of this one before? Are you sure it isn't due to the authoring?

@Paulcat: Let me have a think of having the custom option - adding 2.21:1 is no problem, however.

[ukendt]

Muxman to remux video and only 1 audio and only one sub (custom), created
with ur tool. Dvd lab will create a problem free dvd but it takes more time.
I'll try some other prog tomorrow but if I make the sup file with Srt2sub
and remux with Muxman then there is not prob.
In other words the prob seems to be the sup created by ur proggy.

[CoNS]

@ukendt: Hmmm, kinda sounds similar to that old problem with shaking subs created in srt2sup...?! Only, I haven't seen this in SC before.

After creating the SUP file in SC, try to load the file in SC again (via the Manipulate SUP file tool, in the Tools menu) and see how they look...

Also, could you rar or zip both your .srt and .sup file and upload them somewhere, for Paddington to analyze/reproduce the problem? Which settings are you using in SC when creating them?

[ukendt]

http://www.cotse.net/users/ukendt/Paddington/

U'll find the 3 files:
1) orig srt
2) Srt2sup
3) SC

About SC: I use unicode and I place the subs near the buttom.
I can't reproduce the prob if I use manipulate. Prob exists only after I mux with Muxman and only with the SC created file. I'll make more tests tomorrow evening(short of time now) and I'll write about them

[CoNS]

I've had a look at the bitmap subs created with SC that you uploaded. As you say yourself, they all look fine when analyzed as a separate stream (SUP file).

I haven't had the time to mux them with a NTSC video stream to check, might do that later.

Anyway, for testing purposes, could you try and author/mux all your streams together using IfoEdit (latest version 0.971 which doesn't have NTSC authoring issues like the previous version) and also ReJig - instead of using MuxMan - just to see if the problem somehow is related to MuxMan and not SC... I suspect it's an authoring bug, even though the srt2sup subs don't cause problems for you, but let's see...

If it is an authoring issue, you should of course involve MPUcoder by posting in the MuxMan thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=93553).

EDIT: Just to make sure I understand you right: When you say that DVD lab "will create a problem free dvd", do you mean by using the specific SUP file created by SC (didn't know DVD lab could use SUP files?), or by using the text srt file to create its own bitmap subs?

[ukendt]

Cons...
U should know DVDLab use txt files only :D
and as I wrote I'll do some more testing tomorrow....all my family is here and I must attend to them otherwise they will say I'm a IT freak :rolleyes:

[Paddington]

@ukendt: Thanks for uploading the files - I've just downloaded them, and had a first look. As I think I've found a possible bug in SC, let me have a play first before you or anyone else looses anymore time. If you could just tell me which subtitles were shaking (just give me a couple in the beginning!). Thanks!

[ukendt]

Hi Paddington, the "Sc" subs were shaky but not all the time...maybe every 5th line (it makes me think the feature "sinchronize every 5th line" is to blame although I had no need of sinchronizing).
I muxed again using ifoedit and the results are the same but ! then I played with manipulating tools and changed random settings of sup file, remuxed again and the shaky lines disappeared.
I'll wait for the solution You are writin' about...and I'll test again, but for the moment if some1 has this prob I recommend manipulating the subs, changing settings random and going back to original, save the sup and remux.
And 1 other thing: subs from Srt2sup are fine if used alone (no matter which mux prog) but they appaear "weared" with buttom errors, if manipulated and mux together with the other 2 (1 being work of DvdLAb Pro)

[CoNS]

Hi Paddington, the "Sc" subs were shaky but not all the time...maybe every 5th line (it makes me think the feature "sinchronize every 5th line" is to blame although I had no need of sinchronizing).I've just tested some subs from SC v1.8.4 on a NTSC DVD and they looked fine. I created four different sub stream with SC (various font settings) and none of them were shaky in any way. I didn't manipulate them before muxing (with MuxMan)... I'll do a test later today with your subtitles for The Jacket and see if I can reproduce the problem on that one.

EDIT: Did you see the shakiness while playing the movie on both your PC and standalone, or just one of them?

I muxed again using ifoedit and the results are the same but ! then I played with manipulating tools and changed random settings of sup file, remuxed again and the shaky lines disappeared.Sounds weird!

And 1 other thing: subs from Srt2sup are fine if used alone (no matter which mux prog) but they appaear "weared" with buttom errors, if manipulated and mux together with the other 2 (1 being work of DvdLAb Pro)Hell, that's even more weird!! :p

[ukendt]

EDIT: Did you see the shakiness while playing the movie on both your PC and standalone, or just one of them?

On all of my TVs (21" mono-no name, 29" Stereo Panasonic, 30" Philips LCD).
Nothing wrong on PC . I even burned with 3 different kinds of media, same result( Datawrite gray, RitekG05, CMC MAG A01) and I have no probs with those media otherwise. I even switched stand alone on Panasonic TV using Euroline (2 different kinds), Philips (520) and Blutinum (Aldi).
All those things direct to some kind of error in SC.
Later on this evening I'll try another dvd (also NTSC) I did recieve yesterday by mail. I'll rip the english subs and convert them with SC and mux again, but this takes some time because I don't want to waste dvds and I'm using rewritable from now on.
And YES Paddington, I read what U wrote, nevertheless I feel like making more tests anyway as long as I use rewritable media

[mpucoder]

Are you possibly talking about the flicker caused by an odd number of high contrast lines? This is only seen on interlaced displays, like televisions.

[CoNS]

@mpucoder: Is that why the subs created with srt2sup are often flickering, too? I've had this problem many times with certain combinations of font faces and font sizes in srt2sup. It's been a while since I've used srt2sup, but as far as I remember I also flickered when viewing on PC...? So it's probably not the same bug?

@ukendt: Ok, that's why nothing was wrong when I tested a DVD on my PC with your subs on! I'll burn it to a DVDRW and test on my standalone Sony.

[ukendt]

Are you possibly talking about the flicker caused by an odd number of high contrast lines? This is only seen on interlaced displays, like televisions.

No. this is not the issue. Never had probs like this before, using SC for the first time(couldn't make earlier versions to work).
All other progs I use and used in the past (specially my favorite, Maestro) never showed this kind of behaviour on TV. And we are talking about "random" flickering, i.e. every 5 line ( I saw the old movie again)

[CoNS]

ukendt, I've now burned a DVD (NTSC) with your subtitles. I watched 10 minutes of the movie, and there're no shaking subtitles at all, when I play it...

I burned the movie only, i.e. muxed the video and audio stream together with the two SUP files you provided (using MuxMan v0.14f). In Muxman, I made sure that PS, LB and Wide were all selected for both subtitle streams. Other than that I didn't change anything. Before that, I had used PgcDemux latest version for demuxing the streams...

On my new DVD, the srt2sup SUP file was the first subtitle stream, and the SC SUP file was the second one... I didn't keep any of the original subtitles.

After muxing, I tested it in MPC, burned it to a DVDRW using Nero and tested in my standalone Sony DVD player and Sony 32" 16:9 TV. Both my TV and standalone players are PAL by default, but they can play/display NTSC material aswell.

Which subtitle lines exactly (numbers) are messed up in your copy?

[Paddington]

Hold your horses: I actually think it has to do with Ukendt's DVD player, rather than anything else. The DVD standard is not so 'standard', and there are different ways to do the same thing. In principle, it works as follows: the subtitles are stored as run-length encoded interleaved bitmaps. 00 (2 zero bytes) represents end of line, and indicates that the rest of the line should be filled with the color index 0. However, some DVD players (nor srt2sup, for that matter), don't seem to understand that, and expect you to write a whole line of data first. The shakiness might result from your DVD player sometimes misinterpreting an end of line sequence. As a result the interleaved bitmaps are swapped (e.g. 1,0,3,2,5,4...). I will do some final tests, and post the new release asap (fortunately, today is the Queen's birthday, so I have a day off to fix it.)

--- Update

I've just uploaded Version 1.8.5 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/subtitlecreator/), which hopefully solves Ukendt's problem, so hope you have time to try it. Now, when you load the sup in srt2sup, it should also display OK. I've just tried it on one of my DVD's, and it still displays fine (but then again, I didn't have any problems before).

This new release also contains some of CoNS, and some other forum users' requests.

New features:

Improved the 'too long subtitles' warning, those lines that are colored light blue (go to next using CTRL-N). Also, when you change the font, the warnings are automatically updated. You can unselect this feature in the Settings menu.
When loading a new subtitle file, I automatically cleanup the file (remove double spaces, add spaces after commas, unselect lines with @ or HTTP references, etc.) You can unselect this option in the Settings menu.
Added auto-adjust SUP position (automatically position the SUP in the currently selected subtitle text area) to the tools menu.
If you prefer to see the actual output, instead of a slightly slicker version, you can select the "Show actual output" mode in the Settings menu.
When you change the subtitle text, you immediately see the results on the screen.
Added (un-)select all subtitles to the listView's context menu.
Added remove line breaks to the listView's context menu.
Added a new (requested) aspect ratio of 2.21:1.
Added search function to the Manipulate SUP window.
Added tooltips to the Manipulate SUP window.

Bug fixes:

Shaky lines (see above) fixed, I hope
Fixed update of times in listview after shifting time or frame rate conversions
When using the "Save SUP as..." function in File menu, the file is now automatically written as well.
Fixed a bug when opening an NTSC movie, so it displays the correct background and repositions the GUI.
Fixed a bug when loading a background (4:3 in NTSC mode)
Renamed "Insert shortcut" to "Insert autotext", which allows you to easily insert Music or copyright symbols

[Paulcat]

Paddington: Thanks for the 2.21:1 AR, that will help me a lot. I have yet to see some of the other AR's that you allow for (although I have seen 2.5:1, which is useless since I have to crop it for TMPGEnc and I end up with 2.21:1 anyway)

Paulcat

p.s. I assume Australia is PAL as well as the UK?

[CoNS]

Yep, the aussies have PAL by default...

[Alex-2k1]

Vertical alignment don't work in 1.8.5 version? In 1.5.4 version work perfecly midle alignment.

[Paddington]

Vertical alignment don't work in 1.8.5 version? In 1.5.4 version work perfecly midle alignment.
You are right, so thanks for that - I've already fixed it and will upload version 1.8.6 this weekend.

[bloodem]

hello guys... i have a problem, i wonder if you can help me. I added a subtitle to a DVD but can`t load it. I mean, it doesn`t appear in the subtitle menu (in windvd, when i right click the image it should be a subtitle menu but that menu appears empty) What should I do ? I guess I must modify something in the VTS_01_0.IFO or something...
Thanks ;)

[ukendt]

We need a step by step in order to help, with progs versions and so on.
Please specify

[bloodem]

well, I bought the DVD (Star Wars Episode 4 remastered 2004) and of course wanted to add subtitles so I did what I always do. I used VobEdit v0.6 to demux the streams, then I used SubtitleCreator (which btw, is great! congrats!) to create the sup file and then Ifoedit0971 to reauthor the dvd, remuxing the streams. Then I took the original (well, "original" as in the original IFO files) and used them for the remuxed DVD. This is something I did hundreads of times before and it worked perfectly. Until today that is.... Like I said, when I right-click the image in WinDVD there is a Subtitle Menu. In this menu there should be two options: 1. Subtitle: None, 2. Subtitle: English, French, Spanish or whatever. Well, this menu is empty. There is no option. So what I did, was overwrite the VTS_01_0.IFO with one from another DVD (which has this menu) and it works, the subtitle menu appears corectly. The only thing is that the DVD's menu gets mixed up (because of different cell ids). So, what could I possibly do to correct this problem? I mean, have my original VTS_01_0 display the subtitle menu...

[CoNS]

I used VobEdit v0.6 to demux the streams, then I used SubtitleCreator (which btw, is great! congrats!) to create the sup file and then Ifoedit0971 to reauthor the dvd, remuxing the streams. Then I took the original (well, "original" as in the original IFO files) and used them for the remuxed DVD.Your problem is most likely not related to SubtitleCreator. My guess is that it's caused by that ugly hack you describe (copying the original ifo files over the new ones manually)...

Even though this method may had worked for you before, it's NOT the way to do it. The .ifo files contain precise information of the content of the corresponding .vob files, and this information is not identical when authoring a new DVD.

Please see this post (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=672301#post672301) on how to do it (step 5b) using VobBlanker. You can also do it correctly using IfoUpdate, see step 3 in this guide (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=83566).

Also, in general I recommend using PgcDemux for demuxing and MuxMan for muxing/authoring as VobEdit and IfoEdit are known to have certain issues in these processes.

[bloodem]

well, thanks a lot ;) Those links will help. Anyway, I actually realized what the problem was. The "Subtitle Stream Change" option was enabled in "Prohibited user operations" in the Ifo file. Anyway, another question... does anybody know how I might make a subtitle default so that when I open the movie it loads that precise subtitle automatically. (usually the default subtitle is None).

[CoNS]

Search and you shall find.... :)

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=95902

[bloodem]

thanks a lot! it worked perfectly :)

[Like the Cure]

Hi! I just wanted to say that I absolutely love SC, but I do have a small problem. I got the latest version from SourceForge, 1.8.5, and the subs it produced had that problem with small spots appearing below, apparently left over from a previous line of text. From what I gathered, this problem was already addressed and fixed, although I could be mistaken. Its not horribly bad, just a few stray pixels here and there (probably wont even show up on a television), but just because it doesnt bother me doesnt mean it doesnt bother anyone else.