forced subtitles

[vivid]

I had a problem trying to back up a DVD that had one substream with all the subtitles marked as "forced". I tried a lot of methods to deactivate the forced subtitles that were unnecessary and the only way I could do it was to reauthor with Scenarist or with DVD Maestro, which is an arduous and long process.

My question: Is there any application capable of changing the "forced" flags in a .sub (vobsub) file without having to extract everything to .bmp and reauthor again with one of the big programs? Since "subresync" is capable of reading this flag, I wonder if there is something capable of changing it in an easy way.

[Matthew]

I have no idea, but if no one with some idea replies one thing you can try is this. Compile a very short test DVD with subs but without forced flags. Recompile same DVD but with forced flags.

Extract both subs to sub/idx and then compare in a hex editor. Who knows, maybe the forced flag is a predictable thing that can easuly be changed by changing some bytes in a hex editor.

Just a stab in the dark...

[vivid]

We (a friend and I) have already tried that, but it's not so obvious. This flag is included in a data packet and this spacket is variable and depends on various things, So..., only people who understand this kind of streams will be able to do something about it. I was thinking about the programmer of vobsub, for example.

[Dimmer]

You can find all you need to know on this site (http://dvd.sourceforge.net/dvdinfo/spu.html). It describes the structure of subpicture packs and where to look for Forced Start Display (FSTA_DSP) command, to be replaced with non-forced Start Display (STA_DSP). However, even if you figure this out, you'll go nuts browsing through every subpicture pack in VobEdit and trying to locate the forced subs.

[vivid]

Ok, I'll have a look although I was looking for something to make my life easier, not even harder ;-)
If I just have to look through thousands of bytes I'd rather stick to scenarist, which all of a sudden seems easy in comparison.

Thanks anyway.