Adding chinese subtitles to original DVDs

[viewpoint]

Hi, how do I add chinese subtitles to original DVDs?

By the way, I'm wondering why the chinese-english english-chinese translation for Hollywood movies are so bad! Don't they hire competent translators?

If anyone wants a great movie translated perfectly, I'd be happy to help.

Anyway, I tried using Subtitle Workshop. The chinese characters look fine in that software. When I saved the subtitles as .sub (DVD subtitles), they appear as square boxes in VLC. I've tried using all the chinese-like encoding in VLC, no use. When I save as .srt, it all appears as weird symbols in VLC.

The .sub is attached.

vts_01_1.vob.sub

[manono]

All I see in that .sub file is this:

{HEAD
DISCID=
DVDTITLE=
CODEPAGE=1250
FORMAT=ASCII
LANG=Chinese
TITLE=1
ORIGINAL=ORIGINAL
AUTHOR=
WEB=
INFO=
LICENSE=
}
{T 00:08:08:21
ÎÒ²»ÊÇJerome Morrow
}
{T 00:08:12:72

}

Is that what you intended? There are 2 kinds of .sub files, the text based ones (which is what you have, I think), and the image based ones which always come with an .idx file as well. Yours are definitely not DVD subtitles, not with a header like that.

[jman98]

If you can save in SUP format, you can follow this guide to add them to the DVD:

http://forum.videohelp.com/topic338721.html

Since I cannot read Chinese characters, I can't comment on how bad/good English->Chinese subtitles are. However, Hong Kong movies were infamous in the past for the poor Chinese->English subtitles they had. Studios didn't have much money to pay for subtitling, so they would give a person maybe 1 day to do it and they wouldn't pay very much, so they wouldn't get the best English speakers for the job.

[viewpoint]

Hi, that was all really useful. But I hit a problem with Subtitle Creator.

How do I create multi-line (say 2) subtitles? When I set the number of lines to 2, the first line of text I type in goes to the bottom of the subtitle box. Obviously, the 2nd line of text I type in goes outside (and below) the box.

[viewpoint]

Hi, that was all really useful. But I hit a problem with Subtitle Creator.

How do I create multi-line (say 2) subtitles? When I set the number of lines to 2, the first line of text I type in goes to the bottom of the subtitle box. Obviously, the 2nd line of text I type in goes outside (and below) the box.

All problems resolved in the forum thread pointed to by jman98.

Let it be known that I had successfully created Chinese subtitles. Very neat. Should be possible for any other languages with pictorial characters as well.