[MPlayer-users] Streaming VOBs with subtitles to a Sony PS3 without re-encoding

[Adam Rosi-Kessel]

I've found many discussions on this and other lists about the problem of 
  adding a subtitle stream to a VOB file. As best I can gather, it can't 
be done. So I'm trying to figure out if there is any way to accomplish 
what I'm trying to do with mplayer (or ffmpeg).

The Sony Playstation 3 can play video content served over DLNA/UPnP. I'm 
running fuppes on a Debian server to provide the content. fuppes can't 
serve a DVD in a VIDEO_TS directory -- it can only serve a single VOB 
file. (Similarly, if you connect an external hard drive to the PS3, it 
can only play a single VOB, not read a VIDEO_TS directory).

So I've taken my VIDEO_TS directory and combined the main title into a 
single VOB with mencoder:

mencoder dvd://1 -dvd-device ./movie/ -alang en -channels 6 \
   -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -oac copy -ovc copy -o movie.vob

The output here works perfectly with fuppes and the PS3. (Just 
concatenating the main title with cat doesn't work well; the status bar 
is lost and rewinding/fast-forwarding often dies.)

The only problem with this method is no subtitles are brought over. 
Specifying subtitle options for mencoder makes no difference (e.g. " 
-sid 1 -spuaa 4 -spualign -1 -spugauss 0.7"); you get an identical 
output file. I imagine this is because mencoder won't put a subtitle 
stream in a VOB.

I could of course go through several steps to extract and burn the 
subtitles into the image, but this would require re-encoding the video 
with some quality loss.

There are some other container formats that might support a subtitle 
stream, but I don't think I can use any of those without re-encoding the 
video to different codecs.

So the basic goal is to stream DVD content with subtitles to the PS3 
using fuppes (or another DLNA server) with no quality loss. Does anyone 
have any suggestions about how this might be approached? Is it just 
impossible?