Secondary Subtitles Help.

[chrome]

IS it possible to add secondary subtitles to a movie?

heres the problem: a movie has both english and chinese audio (an english film, with some asians speaking chinese, so its 1 audio track im talking about, not seperate ones), so i want subtitles for JUST the chinese part, not the whole thing. now some dvds have seperate normal subs for this, but one dvd in particular has subtitles for the WHOLE movie, and a secondary subtitle for just the chinese bits.

now i dont know that much about how secondary subs work, but im GUESSING, it takes the original full sub, and just (with the use of time codes?) shows the chinese parts.

Is there any way to rip just the secondary subtitles? or am i just plain stuck with the whole english sub translation... (or is the only way i can do it, by ripping the full sub, and removing the english subs for the english audio, and then merging that with the avi...)

hope what im asking makes sense, any help will be greatly appreciated.
thanks.

[Hiro2k]

Originally posted by chrome

now i dont know that much about how secondary subs work, but im GUESSING, it takes the original full sub, and just (with the use of time codes?) shows the chinese parts.


Most movies have 2 subtitle streams. One for the forced subs, and one for the Main Subs. Are you using AVI burned in subs or SRT subs?

[chrome]

dont know if i fully understand what your asking, but this is ripped straight off the dvd (i have the original vob files) hope that helps.

[unmei]

i don't think VOB turn subtitles on and off, so its probably two seperate stream. If so, open SubRip, load the IFO(VOB) and you will most likely have two entries in the "Language stream" drop-down-box, like "English" and "Chinese only" . Select the one you want and go as ususual :). If for some reason there is only one stream, you could try "show all 32 streams" - most likely it will not help but chances are.

[Hiro2k]

Sorry i phrased that wrong, being up at 2 AM does that to you.

What I meant was, are you using the subtitles in Gknot with VobSub?

Or are you trying to rip them with SubRip, which produces by default the .srt subtitles?

[oddyseus]

Actually it all depends upon the authorer.

If there is an option to display only the Chineese subs then there is a second stream that has them as well as the main one.

Some authoring houses mark these kind of subs as 'forced', so they would display whether or not user has enabled subs. Subrip is capable of picking up the forced subs only.

U must check what applies and inform us.

[chrome]

i went back and had a look at my problem... i was originally using gordian knot, but tried subrip to see if id get any different results - i didn't.

again, i have to pose the question :what is a secondary subtitle. as i said, i believe a secondary subtitle, is just a different set of instructions for a main subtitle stream, see what im saying?

what i believe this means to me, is that i can NOT get just the chinese portions of the film with english subtitles, because the secondary subtitle option for that, takes the original english sub stream, and (by time code information?) only shows the english subs for the chinese sections... this make sense? if you understand what im trying to do, and understand how i believe secondary subtitles to work, THEN perhaps i can get some help - is there another way around this, or will i have to MANUALLY export the WHOLE english sub stream, and MANUALLY remove all the english subs that i dont want, then save the bits i want? it seems quite excessive, there must be a way around this long process.

ill just say this again, there is NO seperate stream for just the english subs of the chinese parts, only english subs for the ENTIRE movie, and SECONDARY subs just for the english subs during chinese sections... hope thats clear. any help GREATLY appreciated. thanks.

[nuked]

I just had this same issue. I thought there was only one stream but
there were 2. I found a post somewhere, maybe here, that tipped me
off. It seems for some reason in this situation the forced subs
may not be labeled in the proper language when subrip or vobsub looks
at it. Did you look at all the sub streams... french spanish etc? One
of them may actually be the english forced stream. I think your idea
of how forced subs is not ,usually at least, correct from what I've
read and from the admitedly only one time I've dealt with it.. There
should be 2 separate streams as mentioned above. By forced we mean the
subs that show up on the DVD even when you don't turn on subs... ie
the ones you want.

nukeD

[chrome]

i use powerdvd to play dvds on my pc. the subtitle stream i want, is not under main subtitles, rather is under "secondary subtitles". whats usually under secondary subtitles, is different placement of the subtitles.. meaning that sometimes the subs will appear on top of the screen or on the bottom, or right under the character thats talking, so you know who says what... that kinda stuff. thats why im thinking secondary subtitles are different set of instructions for the normal subtitle streams. ive checked all of them, none of them are what im looking for, thats why i think that the "forced" subtitles, atleast in this case (and ive noticed, only OLDER dvds have a seperate stream for the forced subs, the newer ones sometimes do it with secondary subs to make them harder to rip?) are time key coded instructions that use the full english sub stream and just show the non-english bits on screen...

just to say again, ive checked all streams, and i have come across older dvds that have so called "forced" subs as seperate streams, but this isn't the case here. thanks for trying though...

[oddyseus]

what u r actually describing in this last post is Close Captioning stream. McPoodle has a nice set of tools and DoItF4U is capable of extracting them and transforming them to text format.

[chrome]

sounds like thats exactly what im looking for. any chance you could post a link where i could find the program (im looking now, but just in case i dont find it...)

many thanks.

[oddyseus]

check this out (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=56865). Also perform a search and give mcpoodle as the argument in user's name.

[nuked]

well sounds like my situation may have been diferent I guess. I'm still
confused too though. The movie I was refering to is not old, it's very recent actually.. of course you never know. But I just went back and
looked at it again in SubRip and I couldn't find the stream I wanted
(plenty of streams I didn't want). But I was
loading the IFO file. Then I loaded the VOB's directly and I found the
stream. I don't know if this is a closed caption or what or if it's
related at all to chrome's issue, but it's kinda strange... to me
at least.

UPDATE:
OK.. I didn't load the VOB's directly actually. I had a vob from
Vobsub accidently as the first VOB. And somehow Vobsub had been able to "find" it. But it turns out in this case, it's all an issue of labelling. It's always there, sometimes just beyond the labelled streams. Probably the stream number is always the same, but I didn't check. Again though, I guess not the same as the cc issue.