Need help getting RID of subtitles in wmv (Windows Media Encoder)

[BooBerry]

Here's a weird one I cannot fond the answer to anywhere....

I bought my little girl a Spongebob branded nfusion media player for Christmas. It was cheap and appropriate buy for a 4-year-old. It requires a very specific format of wmv for videos. No problem. I found a thread on here that told me how to do it.

Knowing that she will want me to make videos for her often, I wanted to see which of my PCs would make the WMV more quickly. I have the exact same copy of Windows Media Encoder on both my laptop and desktop (9.00.00.2980). I used the EXACT SAME mpeg file and loaded it into WME on both computers with, what I thought were, identical settings. I then pressed "Start Encoding" on both PCs, simultaneously. Here's the weird part...

I instantly noticed that the output preview window on my laptop showed subtitles but the output preview window on my desktop did not! Thinking I messed up, I stopped them both. I went through all the settings one at a time. I could see NO differences. I even verified that they were the same files by re-copying the file from my desktop to laptop. I started them, again.... same thing; subtitles on the laptop, none on the desktop.

I let the encode play out, and sure enough, the resultant encode from the laptop had the subtitles, while the desktop version did not. To further verify, I loaded both onto the player and saw exactly whay I expected. One with and one without subtitles.

I've looked everywhere and have come up limp. So now I turn to the Gurus... what did I miss?

[guns1inger]

Start by opening the source file with mediainfo to see what is stored in it. I didn't think an mpg file could contain subs, however a VOB file that had been renamed to mpg could have them (another reason why just changing the file extension on a VOB to get an MPG file is a bad thing to do). If you can't understand the output, post the results from the Tree view here for us to see.

[BooBerry]

Even VLC can tell me that there are 4 closed caption tracks contained. Looking back, this is an mpg that I "joined" from the original vobs with VideoReDo. Perhaps I could go back and try to create a mpg without any subtitles? But I still wonder, what is the reason for the different behavior between the two installations of the same software? There's got to be a setting I'm missing.

Sidenote: I certainly believe you when you say, "changing the file extension on a VOB to get an MPG file is a bad thing to do". Perhaps that is what VideoReDo has done. What I was hoping to accomplish was to join the separate files into a single file for encoding purposes and avoid the need for a 4-hour recode. (Otherwise, I would have to explain to a toddler why a movie was in 4 or 5 separate files.) How would you accomplish this joining of 4-5 VOBS to a single file for encoding purposes without having to go through this?

[jman98]

How would you accomplish this join of 4-5 VOBS to a single file without having to go through this?

Well, unless I missed something, your original post does not say what your input source is. If you have the original DVD, you could simply rip an episode into one giant VOB file. DVD Decrypter and other decrypting programs can do this easily. DVD Decrypter does it via the IFO setting. Note that DVD Decrypter has not been updated in a long time and may not work with some current DVDs. But if I need to rip a TV episode into a giant file for re-encoding, I use it when possible because I'm very familiar with how it works.

[BooBerry]

I used DVDFab to rip the original DVD. It put it in the standard DVD compliance structure. I have a VIDEO_TS folder with, among the other files, 4 VOBS.

I will try a re-rip. But the quesion remains: How do I turn off the subtitles in Windows Media Encoder. Regardless of the source, the same exact file is being used, yet I get two different results. It has to be a software setting.