iDVD and subtitles

[Sgaar]

There are proberly many ways to do this but I have been successful in converting a PAL DVD to NTSC by using DVDRemaster (I am using a Mac) -> MP4 video -> iDVD. I know that I might be loosing some quality but to me in this particular situation it doesn't matter much.

My problem now is that I have a DVD in Danish without English subtitles that I want my non Danish wife to see. The good thing is that I have found the subs and also found SubMerge (www.bitfield.se) to get the subs and video together. The problem comes when I author the DVD in iDVD. For some reason I get a black box in the bottom of the screen:


(above is a screen capture of DVD playback with Mac DVD player from the burned DVD)

after the DVD has been burned. In iDVD preview and in QT everything looks good. I guess that I would like to ask for a best way of doing this and if I am on the right track what DVD authoring software would be able to give me the abilities of iDVD but eliminate the problem.

BTW, if this is a known problem is there a solution to the but iDVD seems to have?

Thanks,

[terryj]

If going back to Submerge and looking for the option
to turn off black bar overlay ( a common feature
found in Title Lab for instance), then the only other way
would be to embed the subtitles into a new movie file,
then burn that to DVD.

One way to do this, is to Play the mp4 file in VLC with the subtitle
file loaded, and "hijack" VLC with iShowU to create a new DV-NTSC
file that can then be dragged/dropped into iDVD and burned to DVD.

Outside of that, the next step would be to move to DVD Studio Pro
to author the DVD.

[rumplestiltskin]

MPEG2 codec from Apple + MPEG Streamclip. Export as a high-quality AVI. Install Perian plugin (either before or after the export; doesn't matter). Now QT Player will play the AVI file and, if the subtitle file is named correctly (myVideo.AVI & myVideo.srt) and in the same folder, QT Player will overlay the subtitles upon playback or export. Export as the high-quality MP4 you wanted and it should have the subtitles embedded. Drop into iDVD.

Seems a shame to bring it all back into a DVD just to play it when there are so many inexpensive devices that will play the mp4 directly to the TV.

[Sgaar]

I am not sure how SubMerge plays into this as it plays fine in QT:



It seems like a bug in iDVD as it might not be able to handle something that SubMerge adds to the movie.

Even iDVD preview doesn't show a problem:

[rumplestiltskin]

I think I can see the problem. Note that the subtitle has a background. iDVD may see this background and misinterpret it so you end up with that black stripe behind the lower portion of the screen. Perhaps if you can turn off this background and simply alter the color of the text (to something like a mustard yellow so it has plenty of contrast with almost any background) it might then encode properly into iDVD.