DVD with subtitle track -> DVD hard-burned titles

[soslow]

Can anyone help me do this the "right way"??

- Source is a foreign-language DVD with an english subtitle track.
- Final product should be a playable DVD-R with english subtitles hard-burned into the video stream.
- The video may need to be re-encoded at a lower bitrate to fit on the DVD-R, not sure yet.

I want to do this in the fewest number of steps to keep the video quality as high as possible -- is there a single tool that can handle this task?

Thanks, slow

[Ghitulescu]

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...89#post1297189

[GrofLuigi]

Demux the needed streams and reauthor with Muxman (optional, if you want to keep the size down or get rid of menus/unwanted streams). Possibly you can use the original DVD too.

Use DvdSubEdit to set the English subtitle as forced.

Burn.

Pros: exact same picture quality, plays with subtitles in all standalone players (most people can't even tell/don't care if its hard or soft subtitles) and most software players (according to my experience, on some it is needed to "enable" the stream, although it's forced).

Cons: See above, in some cases the audience won't see the subtitles immediately/won't know how to turn them on. Isn't suitable for further editing (yeah, even less than the DVD format is suitable... )

GL

[soslow]

Thanks for getting me on the right track. In the end I had to admit there's no advantage to having hard-burned subtitles on the DVD itself when I could force them instead.

I also figured, why force them when I can instead just have them default to "on"? That way people can turn them off if they really want to.

So I compressed the video using good old DVD Shrink and then used PgcEdit to add DVD scripting commands at the start of each title that select and turn on the subs, according to these instructions by 2COOL. Works great!

[Chetwood]

Originally Posted by soslow

So I compressed the video using good old DVD Shrink and then used PgcEdit to add DVD scripting commands at the start of each title that select and turn on the subs, according to these instructions by 2COOL.

Which was unnecessary work in case you haven't kept the menus cause you can set default streams by right-clicking on a title in DVD Shrinks re-author mode. Also keep in mind that this setting can be completely ignored by standalones.

[soslow]

Originally Posted by Chetwood

you can set default streams by right-clicking on a title in DVD Shrinks re-author mode.

Hey, look at that! Learn something new every day. Just for kicks, I tried this out to compare it to 2COOL's method linked above, and the result is identical -- DVD Shrink adds exactly the same PGC command to the end of the title's "pre" script.

Also keep in mind that this setting can be completely ignored by standalones.

Question though -- are they more likely to ignore this "select & turn on subtitle stream in the pre script" method, or to ignore the "convert all subs to forced" method? (Though I suppose one could do both...)

Of course the only way to 100% guarantee it works for every hardware and software player would be to hard-burn them... but I haven't found any misbehaving players in my tests so far (tested about a dozen) so it doesn't seem worth it.

("Standalone" refers to a hardware player?)

[Chetwood]

Standalones are hardware players, yes. My guess is, they more likely ignore the pre script sub settings. Still, I would never hardcode subs since switching them on/off is easy.