Having trouble extracting subs from episodic disc vobs

[Chetwood]

I'm currently testing to put my DVDs as xvid onto my media center PC as they do save quite a lot of harddisk space compard to DVD images (don't let me get started on the piles of original discs stashed in my basement). Since I've always had problems using AutoGK for this I've now tried the Vobsub 2.23 plugin from Virtualdubmod.

For a start I've tried it on a DVD I'd already ripped with DVD Shrink to my hd. When I open Vts_01_1.ifo in Vobsub and select 2 languages from Pgc 1 I get a VTS_01_0.sub of 17 MB. A quick look with Subrip confirms that it does cover my two selected languages but of ALL eps on the disc instead of only the first!

How do I rip seperate subs for each ep?

For a test I re-ripped the first ep with Shrink and tried it again, this time I was unable to get the german subtitles, I got a complete idx file but the sub file had 0 bytes. The english language I could rip just fine.

So is there a better way to automate ripping episodic subtitles to idx/sub?

[BigCondor]

Have you test your ripped ep to see if there is german subtitle in it?
You can open it in PowerDVD or DVDSubEdit.

[Chetwood]

Yes, and there is!

[BigCondor]

Did you used the re-author mode in dvd shrink to rip out the eps with the subtitles you want? If you do, the new dvd will contain all the subtitles you want and ripping subtitles from it will be quite straight forward.

[Chetwood]

That's excatly what I did and thus I'm quite irritated by the fact the the German subtitle stream cannot be ripped. My main question still remains: is there a better way to rip subs from each ep seperately than having extract each ep to a single DVD first?

[midnightsun]

I guess the problem is that you picked the wrong PGC when you had Vobsub extract the subtitles. I have episodic discs in which PGC 1 is not the first episode on the disc but it actually consists of all the episodes, so in my case episode 1 would be PGC 2 (I noticed this when I ripped the DVD with DVDDecrypter: PGC 1 had a running time of 3hrs while the other PGC's listed were all about 45mins long-i.e. each episode). You probably have a similar disc and Vobsub gave you all the subtitles found in all the episodes because that's what PGC 1 is.
I'm not a Shrink expert though so I can't say if there's anything you set up wrong there. If Vobsub says you only have PGC 1 in the IFO Shrink created for you then I suggest you use DVDDecrypter, if it shows more PGC's then most likely PGC 2 will be ep.1, PGC 3 ep.2 and so on, so you'll just have to select the appropriate one.

[Mtz]

If you can't extract subtitles by PGC (option available in VobSub) and you have only one subtitle which include all episodes, you can OCR that subtitle, save as SRT and then cut the long subtitle in how many episodes you have and sync them after one by one using Subtitles Workshop.
If you are using VobSub package one of the programs can cut and add delay. Calculate the movie longs and add delay to every episode.

enjoy,
Mtz