[MPlayer-users] Re: Invisible subtitles on SOME dvd's

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 01:10:53PM +0200, Sumant S.R. Oemrawsingh wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 09:12:23AM +0200, Martin Kaletsch wrote:
> > [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> > On Saturday 21 June 2003 06:28, Jonathan Rogers wrote:
> > 
> > > Sumant S.R. Oemrawsingh wrote:
> > > > On certain dvd's (like region 2 Magnificent Warriors and other hong kong
> > > > legend dvds) the subtitles are completely invisible. I use the correct
> > > > -slang option, also tried the correct -sid option, -spuaa, -spualign etc.
> > >
> > > Have you tried it with other software players like Xine or Ogle? That
> > > could at least tell you whether this is MPlayer specific or not.
> > 
> > I had this problem in the past, too! I usualy managed to view the movie with 
> > subtitles with recent versions of vlc. From ripping this dvds with 
> > trancode/dvd::rip I got the impression that the pallette infomration in the 
> > ifo files was screwed up. (But I don't have the faintest idea how a correct 
> > ifo file looks like, so this is just a guess!)
> 
> Yes, I thought that might be it, specially because transcode lets you fool
> around with palette info of the subtitles, whereas mplayer doesn't (and up
> until these dvd's I have, both hong kong legends, mplayer has always
> displayed the subs correctly).
>  
> > If there is interest, I could try to find out which dvds had the problem and 
> > make the ifos available. 
> 
> Well, I have dvd's with `good' ifo's and the ones with `bad' ifo's, but I
> don't have any time to look into it...
>  
> > ... I just don't have the faintest idea which dvd(s) it was or if it may play 
> > correct with recent mplayer now...
> 
> Anyway, as suggested as well, I'll try one of the other players later today,
> and see if that works. The point of this was, actually to allow me to make a
> copy of my dvd's (with subtitles in the black bars) using mencoder. IMHO
> transcode is too slow and doesn't look as good.

This will waste lots of bits and make the quality bad, for two
reasons. As always, black borders hurt quality, but also the the
hideous pixellated DVD subtitles don't encode well... Using -spuaa
will help of course, but you might not like the blurred look. A much
better approach is to keep subtitles in a separate file (vobsub, or
better yet download nice pretty text subtitle files from dvd.box.sk or
a similar site) and just apply them when you watch the movie. Or, if
you want to use OGM or Matroska container, you can include the text
subtitles in the same file as the movie.

Some other benefits... If you have text subtitles, you don't have to
worry about broken ifo palettes whatsoever. Or, if you extract
vobsubs, you can edit the palette manually and fix it so they'll
display right!

Rich