Two questions related to subtitle ripping

[Darksoul71]

Hi there !

I´m no newbie to DVD ripping but a newbie to subtitles. Most movies I´ve done didn´t really need any subtitles. Now I´ve done Blade 2 and Read Heat (with Arnold Schwarzenegger). Both movies have parts that are "foreign" languages. For Blade 2 this are the parts where the vampires speak "their" language and for Red Heat this are the "russian" parts.

My questions:
1) Even if you don´t enable subtitles your DVD player (software & hardware) "knows" where to show subtiles. For example: Naming the location (as the blood bank at the beginning of Blade 2) or subtiteling parts where the actors don´t talk the "normal" movie language (german in my case). If I extract the german subtitles from Blade 2 this file includes also subtitles for every part of the movie (even the parts spoken in german). So once again:
Is there a subtitle ripper that extracts only the subtitles that a "forced" to play back during the movie ?
Or do I have to edit the subtitle textfile by hand every time I don´t want a sub to appear in the movie ?

I think that there must be a difference between "ordinary" subs and the once that are "forced" to appear during playback.

//Edit: Just found a reply from Schultz that this subtitles are called forced subs but the question remains the same:

Is there a way just to rip the "forced subs" of a movie ?

2) Ripping subtitles from Red Heat was a pain in the a$$.
Here is the subtitle selection that I found in the txt file that smart ripper writes:

Stream[001] X=[[0xE0] Video PAL 720x576] [] [] [] []
Stream[002] X=[[0x80] Audio English AC3(6Ch) 48kHz Normal Caption]
Stream[003] X=[[0x81] Audio Deutsch AC3(2Ch) 48kHz Normal Caption]
Stream[004] X=[[0x82] Audio Español AC3(2Ch) 48kHz Normal Caption]
Stream[005] X=[[0x83] Audio Italiano AC3(2Ch) 48kHz Normal Caption]
Stream[006] X=[[0x20] Subtitle English Normal Caption]
Stream[007] X=[[0x21] Subtitle Deutsch Normal Caption]
Stream[008] X=[[0x22] Subtitle Español Normal Caption]
Stream[009] X=[[0x23] Subtitle Italiano Normal Caption]
Stream[010] X=[[0x24] Subtitle Nederlands Normal Caption]
Stream[011] X=[[0x25] Subtitle Turkish Normal Caption]

OK, so I opened up the ifo of the ripped DVD using Subrip, selected german (which showed correctly in the select box) and started OCR. Guess what ?
The subtitles I found where english. I tried Espanol and, drumroll please, the subs where english again. After playing around for I while I found the german subs under italiano. What is happening here ?

Is the ifo file of Read Heat corrupted ?

TIA,
D$

[oddyseus]

to begin with there is no programm that can defferentiate between is forced and a non forced subtitle. This is done during authoring with the following commands in the son or sst file.

This is a typical header from a son file
st_format 2
Display_Start non_forced
TV_Type PAL
Tape_Type NON_DROP
Pixel_Area (0 479)
Directory
Display_Area (0 0 719 479)
Contrast (0 0 0 15)

#
# Palette entries:
#
# 00 : RGB(255,255, 0)
# 01 : RGB(131,127, 0)
# 02 : RGB( 8, 0, 0)
#

SP_NUMBER START END FILE_NAME
Display_Area (0 0 719 479)
Color (0 1 2 3)

as u can see line 2 sets the non_forced flag for all the subs that follow as true. U just have to add the command

Display_Start forced

to change the status for following subs that u need forced. If u r in Maestro u can double click on the sub and click on the Forced box.

[Darksoul71]

Hi !

@oddyseus: Thanks for answering.

I think that I didn´t male my point very clear.
As DVD-burners are still way too expensive for me I have to stick to DivX and CD-R´s.

My target format for subs is a text file that I can either "hardcode" to the movie during encoding or put on CD-R for later playback via ffdshow playback filter

Vstrip shows much more subtitle streams than the one that the smartripper text file shows.

So, unfortunately, my two questions still remain unanswered:
1) How can I extract ALL subtiltles from VOB files and convert them to text ?
I know Subrip and Vobsub. For Subrip I can choose all sub streams in a VOB but I don´t know which one, for example, is "german forced subs" and doing a search for all sub streams in a VOB is the pain in the a..

2) How is it possible that the sub streams displayed in the smartripper text file are different from the once found by Subrip in the VOB ? Even if I select the ifo, which shows the same sub streams as smart ripper, they are still wrong.

TIA,
D$