"Empty" subtitles?

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t-force
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Feb 18, 2013 10:36 pm

"Empty" subtitles?

Post by t-force »

Hi guys,

Hope someone can provide some assistance with this:

I've been trying to rip the HD-DVD of District B13, a French film with English subtitles. When the disc is played, the subtitles appear with no problem at all. When doing the rip, I selected the English subtitle box, and thought all would be fine. However, although there is a subtitle track listed within the mkv, that Handbrake, VLC and my Mede8er can all see, it appears to contain no subtitles at all!

Anyone got any ideas as to how I can get the subtitles track to rip with the subtitles actually there?
politby
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Apr 30, 2013 7:58 am

Re: "Empty" subtitles?

Post by politby »

I just joined so that I could find a solution to this problem.

I have researched a bit and found out subtitles from HD DVD discs are in a unique format and apparently troublesome. Much as I dread codec packs I installed the Shark packs and followed the instructions which resulted in the LAV decoders and DirectVobSub being active in MKV playback.

The subtitles are shown as active in the DirectVobSub taskbar applet but they are not displayed. In the case of multiple subtitle tracks in the mkv, they are all shown as selectable, so they are evidently identified by DirectVobSub. This looks like the exact same symptom you are seeing.

Then I tried using MKVcleaver to extract the subtitles to .sub files and put them in the same folder as the mkv file. That did not work either. So I googled some more and found out about BDSup2Sub which is supposed to be able to convert HD DVD subtitles to a standard format.

But BDSub2Sup chokes ("Invalid Control Buffer Size") when I try to feed it one of the subtitle files extracted from a MakeMKV-created MKV file.

However, if I extract the subs directly from the EVO files on the disc/ISO, BDSup2Sub reads them.

So the conclusion is MakeMKV does something to the HD DVD subtitles that renders them unreadable, both directly from inside the MKV and if extracted.
paulster
Posts: 200
Joined: Sat Aug 20, 2011 6:54 pm

Re: "Empty" subtitles?

Post by paulster »

This ties in with what I've found. I've always had to use eac3to to extract the subtitles direct from the original EVO files in order to be able to process them with bdsup2sub. Once they're in a MakeMKV-produced MKV file they're no use.

Fortunately I've ripped all of my HD-DVDs so it's not a big issue to me any longer, but it would be nice to get a fix for this.
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