separate widescreen and letterbox subtitles, why bother?

[Matthew]

As this isn't a technical subtitles question, I didn't think it belonged in the subtitles forum. Not sure it belongs here either.

Anyway, I'm curious, because I have this DVD with 2 subtitles tracks - one for letterbox and one for widescreen. But looking at the bmps (extracted using SubRip), the only difference appears to be that the widescreen subs are a little higher up.

Now I'm curious, why would having subs a little higher up be better on a widescreen tv?

[auenf]

the ones that are a little higher up will be the ones for letterbox mode, where instead of the subs being over the black space below, they are over the footage in the same place as the subs would be in wide mode.

btw, all 16:9 DVD's have double subs, you can specify them manually, http://www9.brinkster.com/sportschook/?subpicaspect.jpg, or the authoring program (DVDMaestro definately) will create the subs properly for you automagically.

Enf...

[Matthew]

Thanks for the reply :)

No the widescreen bitmaps are higher up....this is the case when I use 16:9 mode on my (4:3) tv. The difference is about 0.5-0.7cm when comparing 2 bitmaps outputted by subrip.

Also, I tried one of my DVD-R backups (which are all Maestroed) and on the tv the subs are placed in the same spot in 16:9 and 4:3 mode. Not sure what's automagic about that :confused: Isn't the subpicture stream just wacked over the movie in the same spot regardless of whether aspect ratio is 16:9 or 4:3?

[mpucoder]

Subpictures are not resized with the movie video, but mixed after the resizing. So they always fill the screen. This allows subpictures for auto-letterbox to be placed in the black bars, out of the picture (if so desired). It's also needed for auto-P/S to keep the subpictures from panning with the video. However, you can define one stream as the one to use for any/all display modes.

[Matthew]

Thanks mpucoder, that's what I thought.

And as for the dvd at hand, maybe the dvd authorers just thought it seemed like a good idea at the time :)