R2 menus and more

[Irish]

Greetings to all...newbie with a question...I work with fansubbed svcds so I have a fair amount of R2 dvds and ssas. My question(s) are related to the possibility of preserving the original menus and simply adding a subtitles on/off button. Also...generally r2 anime tends to have a small amount of episodes(2-3 generally) so re-encoding isn't an issue yet. However I am wondering how close to the original quality I will get by backing up the dvd to my hd, using ifoedit and adding the AUDIO_TS file, and simply burning the VIDEO_TS dir in nero on my DVR-A04?
Thanks in advance

Irish

[SiC]

I don't think anyone here has been able to preserve the original menu after altering the souce (adding subs, re-encoding, etc.). Once you alter the original source, it'll leave the menu portions of the *.vob files useless. You'll have to strip that down and re-author your own menus. If the menus have animation menus where the background is in motion, more than likely it is an MPEG2 stream with ac3 audio. You should be able to strip that out of the *.vob files to re-author your own menus. For the subpicture portion of your menu, simply use Photoshop and create a clear layer with just text and overlay it (in DVD Maestro) on top of your animation menu screen. If the original menu had animation buttons..... DVD Maestro will not be able to handle it (not positive but I think Scenarist can).

[Vulpine]

I just completed doing a fansub of Read or Die, and am currently working on Kenshin - Seisouhen. I have had to re-author these discs. You don't have to put a button on the menu to enable/disable subtitles. Just have your users use the subtitle button on the remote. (Unless you have empty screen space to play with). As far as the Audio_TS folder goes, it has nothing to do with subtitles. You will need to recreate the vob files with the encoded subtitles.

You will also need to decide on a DVD authoring tool. There are only a few that support subtitles. Scenerist only imports BMP files for subtitles, I believe Meastro allows for text importing, there are also 1 or 2 more that will work as well.

One other thing to be aware of, is the fact that R2 releases tend to be encoded at a very high level. I had to re-encode the ROD just to make room (bitrate wise) for the subtitle track. ROD ended up being 2 discs. Seisouhen will be 1 disc (I had to re-encode that as well to fit the 2 episodes without extras).