Problem extracting closed captions from DVD

[Morte66]

I have two DVDs of the film "Fin Août, Début Septembre", one is French R2/PAL with no subs and the other is US R1/NTSC with closed captions containing English subtitles. The closed captions on the source disc work fine if I play the US DVD (in Zoom Player), but I'd like to extract them to a file I can use as subtitles with the (higher resolution) French video.

I've tried to do this using VobSub, according to the procedure described in passing here (http://www.geocities.com/mcpoodle43/SCC_TOOLS/DOCS/SCC_TOOLS.HTML#capture_DVD). Unfortunately, the VobSub GUI does not appear to detect any captions, as the the checkbox is unchecked to start. Also, it does not produce the expected set of .idx/.sub/.cc.raw/.cc.srt files (I just get a ".chunks" file). It looks like I might have a non-standard DVD as mentioned in the SCC docs.

Is anybody out there familiar with this problem, and do they have a solution to getting subs out of the closed captions? Any help would be appreciated.

[McPoodle]

Have you tried any of the other tools on the SCC Tools site? For example, if you rip the movie to an MPEG-2 video file, you could try using General Parser on it. The complete instructions are here (http://www.geocities.com/mcpoodle43/SCC_TOOLS/DOCS/SCC_TOOLS.HTML#CCExtract).

[Morte66]

Have you tried any of the other tools on the SCC Tools site? For example, if you rip the movie to an MPEG-2 video file, you could try using General Parser on it. The complete instructions are here (http://www.geocities.com/mcpoodle43/SCC_TOOLS/DOCS/SCC_TOOLS.HTML#CCExtract).

I have to admit I caved in and watched the NTSC version. However, in the interests of science I've just tried again using General Parser.

I followed the instructions. I ripped with DVD Decrypter in IFO mode, and used DGIndex to demux which gave me a .M2V file (which plays in Zoom Player, with the captions showing). I opened that up in General Parser, padded to 10GB, and selected "Restart and Save Output As" to create caption.bin. So far so good. At stage 6 (field selection) I went with field 1 and hit "Accept". The status bar at lower left changed to "Parsing... 0%" and CCExtract crashed immediately ("General Purpose Bitstream Parser has encountered a problem and needs to close" etc). Tried again, no luck. Tried the other field on a whim, crashed again.

Did I do anything obviously wrong, e.g. is DGIndex -> M2V OK for the input?

I'm running DVBDUMP (it's been going for 20 minutes and so far produced zero bytes). I've also just kicked off SCC_RIP -d -td -1. I'll post what happens.

[McPoodle]

That's strange. DVBDUMP at the very least should have produced something. As for DGIndex, are you aware that DVD Decrypter can demux (Stream Processing tab, select the video stream and then "Demux")? That's what I usually use.

[Morte66]

That's strange. DVBDUMP at the very least should have produced something.

I aborted it (Ctrl-C) after a couple of hours during which it did nothing except output "I'm alive" dots to the console every ~5 seconds. It then gave me the header line, but no data to follow. I also had to abort SCC_RIP after an hour of dots. It opened an output file, but didn't write to it.

As for DGIndex, are you aware that DVD Decrypter can demux (Stream Processing tab, select the video stream and then "Demux")? That's what I usually use.

Uh, yeah. It slipped my mind, probably force of habit from using DGIndex for DVD backup. I just tried it on the off-chance, and got the same results.

Anyhow, I seem to be at the end of the road. But I'm OK, I've watched the movie. Thanks for your help. If you're actually interested in pursuing this to extend your tools, I'll mail you the DVD if you like.