Burning Subtitles to existing .avi file???

[giannid]

Hello,

I would like to know if it's possible and/or relatively easy to burn subtitles from an .srt file into an existing .avi file.

I have a Philips DVP642 dvd player and while it does play .srt files, it does so in tiny white font with no shading, outlining, etc. This makes it impossible to read the subtitles against a white background.

Could someone please tell me how this can be done?


Thanks in Advance,

Gianni

[castellanos]

Hi and welcome to the Forum!!
You may find this (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=82471) thread interesting.
There is also another way, adding permanent subtitles... but you will have to re-encode the movie again, and you will have a big lost of quality.
Greetings! :)

[giannid]

Hi, thanks for the welcome and link to the other thread. It mostly seems that the problem concerns limitations of the philips dvd player for not having better subtitle support.

I just started working with Nero Recode and it doesn't look promising either. I can't seem to be able to add an external "non DVD" subtitle file and moreover I don't think my dvd player will support the new nero digital codec.

I guess like you said, I could use Nero to recode to mpeg2 and then reconvert to avi. I think the new autoGK beta supports this. However like you said this would likely result in a significant loss of quality and probably isn't worth it.

[matthewmalay]

Someone posted this on the DVD Player Hack section for the DVP642 on www.videohelp.com

Originally posted by javierperezch
Tired of hard to read DivX subtitles???
Try this... it's amazing!!!

1- Insert a disc with a DivX or Xvid movie with subtitles file, and select the subtitles as usual.
2- Press DISC MENU button on the remote. The movie starts playing automatically
3- After the READING INDEX message, press SYSTEM MENU button twice

Doing this procedure, subtitles will be displayed over a semi-transparent gray background, making them much easier to read!!!

Believe me!!! This really works!!!

This only works if the disc has only one movie file and one or more subtitles files. For discs with more than movie file, there is a more complicated workaround. I'll try to explain it in another post.

Another thing you can do is select ENCODING LATIN 2. The font in this encoding is larger than the default encoding one, but some characters like ¿ and ¡ (used in Spanish) show up bad.

I hope all of you can find this "bug" as useful as I do


Greetings from Argentina
Javier



And it works! It makes the subtitles so much easier to read My firmware is the lastest one, v. 1109. Now only if he would post how to do it when there is more than one video file on a disc. If anyone knows please tell us how

[giannid]

Wow!! Thanks Matthew and to Javier.

I want to confirm that it does work, and also that it will work for playing the first video file in a multi-file disc too. By pushing the Disc Menu, you change back and forth from a menu screen to having the DVD play your disc automatically and so it just plays the first video file. Therefore it will work for your first video.

However if you have 20 TV episodes on one DVD-R, you still have to struggle with the last 19's subtitles. Wish that Javier would tell us how to get it to work with a multi-video file CD/DVD! Or better yet, I wish that Philips would address this shortcoming in the DVD player.


I also want to say that I had a non-playable "QPEL"-encoded .avi file of a 90 minute film burnt onto CD that would not play on the DVP642. So I re-encoded the film to mpeg by using NeroVision Express. First I selected the option "Make Movie" to recode the avi file into an SVCD mpeg file. Then I used AutoGK to reconvert it back to .avi, and then burned it to CD. It now plays fine on the DVP642 when it didn't before, and there doesn't seem to be much loss in quality. It did take about 4 hours to do it, but it worked.

The same process should also work for burning subtitles into the file because autogk's 1.80 beta release says that he added support for external subtitles to be burnt into final AVI (TXT,SRT,SSA,SUB for text subs, IDX for vobsub subs)

[matthewmalay]

After much searching, I found the way to do it with mutli video discs

Whenever the player goes into NO MENU mode, it scans the inserted disc for all types of known files and then assigns each one of them a number. While doing this we can see "PLEASE WAIT... " blinking on the screen.

1- We set the player to MENU ON mode and then browse the menu and check the numbers that have been assigned to each file (We should also browse subfolders).
2- Set the player to NO MENU mode and when the first file of the disc starts playing press STOP.
3- With your remote, enter the number of the subtitle file (found on step 1) and press OK. A small hand will appear on screen and then press SUBTITLE button. You will read DIVX SUBTITLE SELECTED.
4- Now enter the number of the video file and press OK on your remote. The movie starts to play.
5- Now press SYSTEM MENU twice like on first procedure.
That's all!!

The tricky part is when you have subfolders, cause in the menu browser for each subfolder it will the first file will be assigned the number 1.

Example, say you have 3 subfolders in a disc with a movie and a subtitle file in each folder. In the menu browser the assigned numbers will be like this

0-Root

1-1st Folder

1-Movie 1
2-Subtitle file 1

2-2nd Folder

1-Movie 2
2-Subtitle file 2

3-3rd Folder

1-Movie 3
2-Subtitle file 3

But when you go to no menu and do steps 3 and 4 the corresponding numbers for each movie and subtitle file are assign like this

1-Movie 1
2-Subtitle file 1
3-Movie 2
4-Subtitle file 2
5-Movie 3
6-Subtitle file 3

I hope I explained this clearly

I don't know why they made this so complicated, this feature should have been easily accesable considering how hard the subtitles are to read instead of having me to press a bunch of buttons and memorize and add numbers up just to get subtitles I can read.

[giannid]

Matthew,

Good job finding the trick!! I tried something similar but didn't try it with the disc menu turned off. Well done.

Okay, I did what I said and converted an .avi file to .mpg using NeroVision Express 3 (That's the new one as of Dec. 03, 2004) and then reconverted back into an .avi (xvid) with burned-in subtitles using autoGk.1.81b. It worked great, although it took about 2½ hours for a 30 min. file on my system (xp2800,512). Half an hour to make it into SVCD mpg and about 2 hours to double pass it back to .avi.

There seems to be no visible loss of quality and perhaps the final project is actually better than the original! On the Television, I can't tell the difference. However, with the burnt-in subs it is much, much, much easier to read than using the .srt file, even with the shading trick.

I found that if a subtitle frame had 2 lines as for 2 different speakers, then the DVP642 would run the lines together. In other words it wouldn't respect the separate lines and it would take all or part from the bottom line and join it to the top line.

I am going to attach a couple of files. The first one is from the original and the 2nd is from the reworked one. I captured the images from powerDVD. The first is without subtitles (you know how they look anyhow), the second has them burnt in.

[giannid]

Okay, here's the original in DivX-3
http://tinypic.com/w06dk
And below is the reworked version with xvid.
http://tinypic.com/vizyp

This is how the burnt-in subs look on my TV using the DVP642. They are burnt-in however and thus you can't turn them off. Hopefully we should expect Philips to offer a firmware update regarding the subtitle problem, so it probably isn't worth burning subs into everything. I must say that I am impressed with the conversion in that there is insignificant quality loss in transcoding using NeroVision and AutoGk.

I should also say that the original video was sized at 448x352, and the reworked was resized at 592x448. The original video size is 350MB and the reworked is 348MB.

[matthewmalay]

Why don't you just open your avi file in VirtualDub and use the Textsub filter (install vobsub to get it) to add the subtitles and then re-encode to avi with Xvid. Saves you a step

[giannid]

Matthew,

I don't really know how to use those programs. I just let AutoGk do the work because I don't have to know much about encoding to get really good results. I'll probably try to dabble in those programs a bit to see if I can get it to work, and actually your response was pretty much what I was looking for when I first posted.

Thanks,

Gianni

[Glacier505]

Originally posted by matthewmalay
Why don't you just open your avi file in VirtualDub and use the Textsub filter (install vobsub to get it) to add the subtitles and then re-encode to avi with Xvid. Saves you a step

because it would take quite a bit of time to reencode every video file, especially if you have like a tv series or something you are trying to work with. I do not have a phillips dvd player so I dont have that problem, but I have a tv episode with a .ssa subtitle file. Is there any way to burn in the subtitles without having to reencode the episode?

NOTE: I have a bunch of TV episodes currently in xvid format which I am trying to convert to DVD, but im having some problems with the .ssa subtitles. I tried using DVD2SVCD to convert the xvid to dvd, but it gives me an error which sounds like it has something to do with the subtitles file. Is there a way to convert it to DVD without burning it in then?