Fixing sub background color

[autje]

Long time reader, first time asker. Haven't been able to find an answer searching through the forums (or Google, for that matter).
I've got this black & white movie that has white subs. Whenever the movie itself gets too light in color, the subs have a solid black bar as a background, so that you can still read the white letters.
After doing the rip, the bar is still there, but it has turned into light gray instead of black. I tried 2COOL's trick Subtitle Color Copy&Paste trick, but that didn't help. I can see that the values for the 16 colors are now equal in IfoEdit, so the copy/paste succeeded.
After much searching, I've got the impression that IfoEit and PgcEdit (which I also tried) only affect the color of the letters, not the background. I've read in one of the threads that opacity is embedded in the VOB's, which I'm guessing is my problem here. Is there any way to fix this in a finished rip? And if not, considering I still have them .bmp files, what's the easiest way to handle it then?
Many thanks in advance for your answers.

[zacoz]

Welcome to the posting fraternity.

Did you do any processing, or simply a straight rip ? Using what ?

I don't profess to be able to answer your query anyway, but the info may help when someone in the know comes along.

[autje]

I used the big 3 method (DoItFast4U, ReAuthorist, DoCCE4U, Scenarist), following Doom9's guide like I always do. This is the first time I've run into a problem like this.

[HappyCamper]

The color for the subtitles is set with commands in the subpicture stream itself that assign it to an index of one of the colors in the PGC's CLUT. When you change the color with IFOEdit or PGCEdit, you are just changing the color in the CLUT for that particular index. To add a background color for the subtitle text, the subpicture stream needs to be re-rendered with such a background.

My father-in-law wanted to watch a DVD whose only audio was in a foreign language, so he needed the English subtitles. The problem was that his vision is not so good and he was having trouble reading some of the subtitles, especially when the scene in the background was a light color. What I did to fix it so that he could watch is was to use SubRip to OCR the English subtitles and then reauthored the disc in DVD-Lab Pro where I was able to re-render the subtitles in a font that was a little more spaced out and on a black bar background. It worked very well and he was finally able to enjoy the movie.