Perplexed by Subtitling. Slap if neccessary.

[EddyH]

OK. Looked thru the guides, searched round the forums, can't seem to find any pointers, only other people asking the same question and not getting much of a helpful answer. (Please don't send me back to the guides, unless you include the address of the page I missed there).

So, a simple answer sought to a maybe not so simple question:

Is there a way to rip a DVD, and encode it to VCD using TMPGEnc, whilst including (hard-coded) the subtitles FROM THAT SAME DVD, as in right from those VOBs?

Number of steps, programs, etc, not a problem, so long as it can fit inside of, oooh say, 20-25gb free disc space (grab it while it's still there..), about a week of solid 850mhz CPU time and 12-20mb/s disc transfer (would be the best uptime yet)...

As an alternative, what's the encoding quality of DVDx like, and can it do CQ?

It's more of a curio than anything at the moment... the disc in question has a very good english sound track that knocks the subbed japanese into a cocked hat (and i'm a dub guy anyway), but it may prove useful in future. Tried out VOBSE so far (out of the many, many, many sub programs that i'll be trialing over the next day or two...) which seems to choke on it, guess Comic Sans Bold isn't that OCR-friendly when at 11 point size without anti aliasing.

The rest of the DVD coding is going OK at least, now I've figured out how to get rid of the worst of the interlacing.. though it's not all removable.. what I thought would be a good, straightforward and clean PAL anime to use as a DVDrip starter movie has turned out to be a half-assed conversion from a 30fps NTSC original instead, so far as I can tell. So the interlacing cockups and half-frame smears are actually hardcoded :/ Odd-Even (does that mean Odd minus Even, or something else?) deinterlacing appears to do the best, though still merely 'average' job.
Suppose that's what the output of a pro frame converter looks like. Smooth as anything on the TV, but of course you feed it to the computer and all hell breaks loose!

Thanks in advance, if anyone has any knowledge to drop
-mp

[sterno]

Is there a way to rip a DVD, and encode it to VCD using TMPGEnc, whilst including (hard-coded) the subtitles FROM THAT SAME DVD, as in right from those VOBs?

Yes, it's pretty easy. You use vobsub and frameserve through avisynth or virtualdub. There is a guide for using vobsub, just ignore the parts about "textsub" - if you're going straight from a ripped DVD you only need vobsub. It will put the subtitle images on the movie as images, no OCR to worry about.

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/userguides/87065.php

[EddyH]

Thanks, that IS a page I missed

Now if using this I can just get VDub to work with VOBs and frameserving like it never worked before.... (even ended up saving one film to a 98% quality indeo just so as some vdub customised IVTC could be carried over to TMPG..)

Typical tho, VOBSE seems to be working OK now after I zapped & reinstalled it... except that the timestamps seem to be totally random and therefore useless... the first five minutes of the film get stamped as 00:00:07, and then after that count up veeerrry slowwwly...

[EddyH]

-sigh-
That would have been a fantastic pointer and guide, had i not downloaded all the progs, waited 15 minutes for vobsub to index the files, only to find that, even after upgrading from v1.40 to v1.51...

VIRTUAL DUB (still) CANNOT HANDLE MPG2 FILES OF ANY TYPE, INCLUDING VOBS.

gahhhhhghhh.

oh well back to the drawing board, as Marvin would say. Anyone else?

...If I have 20gb free across a few partitions and can pool it together, would that be enough to make a huffyuv avi of the film?
(does maths)
no.. likely not... more likely that it would eat my entire 180gb drive in fact... or a good ~40gb even at VCD rez.

[DivXExpert]

AVISynth.
Slap slap slap.

Open the .vob files in DVD2AVI, save a project. Load the MPEG2DEC.dll plugin (in avisynth) then use the .d2v(project file) as your mpeg2source. Add subs in avisynth (VOBSub).

No need to frameserve from VirtualDub to TMPGEnc. you can load the AVISynth script directly into TMPGEnc.

AVISynth is one of the best tools I have ever used. I can now fix almost any bad telecine DVD with decomb(avisynth filter).

As for you PAL interlace problems. Decomb. if its from a 29.97fps NTSC, and is a film source, you may be able to speed it up from 25 to 29.97, then ivct with decomb using the telecide, then decimate(cycle=5) commands.

If its really messed up. Just use a field deinterlace. Even, or Odding the fields will just result in jerky motion.

[EddyH]

Thanks. I'm going to go away and put some soothing lotion on my cheeks now
(wonders how he missed the avisynth thing.. guess i ignored it cuz it said AVI at the start )

The telecine thing sounds... interesting.. may need a couple days with practical experimentation to figure out what you mean, but still thanks.

It's not actually looking too bad with the odd-even filter (it says "(field, adaption)" after it..), but of course with other things running on the PC at the same time it's hard to judge a video's smoothness. Acid test will be putting it on a RW and using the DVD/television instead (and playing the actual disc afterwards, to see if the viewing of the original DVD is forever ruined..). Even the plain odd-only/even-only filters looked kind of wierd; "double" may work better though. Thank goodness it's a fairly old and low-speed anime..

Suppose it doesn't help that I'm vertically resizing it by a factor other than 1/2 either... not turning on any de-interlacing made it look hyper ugly, even though it was fine (if a little temporally blurred) when reduced by exactly 1/2.

Thank you from my own heart, and hopefully, that of several silent others.

[EddyH]

Ok a final question. We hope.
Is it safe to assume that my avisynth installation has gone wrong if I have no AVISYNTH.EXE, only an uninstaller and several folders with AVS and HTM files?
Or am i getting this all wrong and all it's merely supposed to do is all the DLL to windows, and all the donkey work is actually done in notepad with a script file that links to it?

(never been too good with script stuff, unless it's in line-numbered BASIC or low level .BAT files. neef.)

(reads AVIsynth documentation)

Oh sweet jesus, that looks like C++ or something.

(dies)

[EddyH]

Wowzers. I could feel the last shreds of 733t draining out of me as I tried to work out how to do that. There didn't seem to be anything comprehensible telling you how to do it (despite reams of such stuff as running the D2V through a VFAPI converter and the like to use in virtualdub...), certain websites such as AviSynth Docs were broken, so on and so forth.

Finally found help in, of all things, the guide headed "How to frameserve VOBs into CCE with Virtualdub and AviSynth (NOT FOR TMPGEnc USERS!)"... now I have some kind of script hashed out, but it's not working. All I get is, depending on what I tweak, one of three errors, when previewing in media player.
(it also says exactly the same thing if i try encoding with tmpgenc or viewing in vdub)

"Unrecognised exception! (H:\TEST.AVS, line 3)"
That's what happens with the unmodified script as copy-pasted below. Good to know that not even the frameserver understands whats gone wrong..

"AVIFileSource: couldn't open file (H:\TEST.AVS, line 3)"
o...k... then... doesn't say which file though. There *shouldn't* be anything else accessing the AVS file right now. After all windows crashed when I first tried to load VobSub and terminated the two pair of audio and video encoders that were going at the time, not to mention word and powerpoint

"Script error: there is no function named "mpg2source" (H:\TEST.AVS, line 3)"
Well, I thought i'd give it a fling in case i'd misspelt something. At least it shows the .dll is correct and recognised, even if it's broken.

Actual script code (modified to hide real file names - and yes, i checked that those were correct as well)

---

loadplugin("h:\video\avisynth2\plugins\mpeg2dec.dl l")
loadplugin("c:\windows\system\vobsub.dll")
mpeg2source("h:\film_english.d2v")
vobsub("h:\video\film_eng")

---

(the .idx and .sub files are, for the purpose of this, film_eng.idx and film_eng.sub... just using the VOBs ripped for the english version, and the english subs; i can extract, encode and mux the japanese audio separately later on )


So..... now what?

At least I have spare time, as the non-subbed video is still encoding... using DVD sources seems to slow TMPGEnc by a good 30%..

[EddyH]

OK. This is getting on my wick now. I know I'm writing the scripts right, heck I'm even building them with cut and paste from the guides and the actual file names. Even when I pared the file right down to the MPG2 decoder and the filename (no vobsub or anything, just two lines), the same error, except now it's on line 2...

Some kind of software screwup? Both AVISynth and MPG2Dec DLL seemed to download and install without any problems, the example AVISynth files work fine, etc..

Highly annoying.

[DivXExpert]

Get AVISynth 2.0. Not 2.5.

Now try.

[DivXExpert]

If its anime, you need to IVCT. This is a must with anime encoding.

Once you get a hang of AVISynth, you will love it.

Also, anime usually looks better after filtering. SmartSmootherHQ, and 2DCleaner seem to really help.

Cleaner the source, the cleaner the destination.

[DivXExpert]

Also, if your source is gonna be MPEG2. You could open the .d2v in TMPGEnc, and use interlaced source, and encode interlaced. From what I understand you are encoding to a DVD. Why then you want to use VirtualDub?

[EddyH]

OK, I think I have it whipped now... let's see... just a few hints for the last few posters I don't know whether i mentioned them before or not, please forgive.

1. I'm encoding to VCD; interlaced output isn't an option . If it was to DVD, there'd probably be far less trouble. There's guides for everything in the universe, except how to easily put DVD subtitles on a VCD with TMPGEnc.. I may now go write one.
Oh and I didn't want to use virtual dub at all, well, at least when i found out when it wouldn't do mpg2 i didn't. Plus I've had frameserving troubles with it before (i.e, it wouldn't), but those seem to be ironed out - see later.

2. I'm encoding from a PAL DVD to a PAL VCD, IVCT isn't part of my usual modus operandi unless working with a fairly rare case of telecined NTSC film -to-PAL (unless it was needed as PAL, i'd just drop it in as 30fps NTSC ). Certainly wasn't expecting to need it in this case, anime or otherwise. Should have just been able to plug a 25fps source through to a 25fps output with no trouble, apart from maybe getting the field order right. But of course, once again, it's a case of people who are actually getting paid to produce this stuff knowing dick-all in comparison to the hobbyists :/
If big car manufacturers were to kitters and hotrodders as pro media houses are to hacksors ( ), then there'd be a queue round the block for the latest Eddymobile H... (or whoever). Sweeping generalisation of course, but I rarely look at a car and think "I could have done far better than that, happily for a quarter the wage they're getting".. TV/DVD/CDs on the other hand..
It's not all bad. For one thing, the picture quality apart from the botched conversion is Schweeet. No need for noise reduction filters or any of that (incredibly bloody slow) guff. Those belong making my incredibly noisy digicam 10fps shots viewable (and making the encode take 3x longer to boot)...

3. AVIsynth can kiss my hairy numb behind I'm sorry, to do the one thing I wanted to do with it, it probably would have been easy enough had it worked, but learning C language is definately on my list of things to do in 2005 and no earlier. Don't need the complexity and going back to find other versions when I could just unzip the copy of VFAPI thing I downloaded earlier, give it ten seconds to convert the avi signpost, then set it up all fine and dandy and easily configurable/tweakable in Vdub. All I want to do is do the one extra step needed to insert subtitles into my otherwise prepped MPG after all
Happily whilst I was there I discovered the Smart Deinterlacer... so that problem's gone too.


Ahem. Since I last looked in this forum, what has happened:
Looked through some more / related guides. Got VFAPI. Got a different sub engine that could do OCR. Tried reading the VFAPI'd fake AVI thru Vdub instead of half assededly putting an AVIsynth script together. Success! Installed crop filter on top of smart deinterlace, then resize back to full width (and 448 height, correcting slightly squashed aspect - guess they didn't lineconvert it either) with padded out vertical borders. Had a go at getting Vobsub working in there (and found that it could be previewed in resize without having to go back to the main screen). Output was pretty good but a little blurred. Had a go at using textsub with the script ripped with a different tool (SubRip) that did an *excellent* job of OCRing it all - not a single error, except those hardcoded in the subs and saved to a number of formats (found subviewer2 was best - most configurable by editing the actual sub file). Textsub output was even better, except 10 frames slow and still in crappy, over-large, white comic sans. Used subconvert to correct the timing error (down to 2 frames fast, compared to vobsub - good enough), and altered the sub file to give a slightly pale yellow, properly sized century gothic font. Set it up, tweaked the position, looked great in VDub preview (though it needed an insane screen rez to get both windows to display ). Set up a frameserver, loaded the signpost into TMPGEnc fearing the worst... oddly, it worked immediately. A little slow, but even if it puts an extra hour on that makes little real difference. It's now encoding, has been for the past ~20 minutes. Looks cool, right now in the middle of a (subbed) opening tune. Just got to see how massive (or otherwise) those 18pt (before shrinking to VCD rez) subs look on the TV...

So.
Mini guide to adding subtitles. To be refined later.

Rip VOBs with Smartripper.

Produce a project file with DVD2AVI, selecting the right WAV language and all.

Send the WAV to Cooledit / Goldwave / wherever to resample 48->44khz (don't let dvd2avi do it) and run whatever other filters (in my case, amping by about 6db, and low passing the surprisingly good audio to 17.5khz, makes the encode work better at 192k while sounding 95% the same), encode the mp2 file, etc.

While that goes on, open up SubRip, select the appropriate vob/s, language, etc. All them options. (hey, i'm tired )

Set it up to run OCR on the text. Press go and let it fly, you'll need to babysit for a minute or two, then come back occasionally to see whether it's finished or needs more input. Be sure to check that the text appearing at the bottom is accurate, too. This shouldn't take very long all told, it's a blindingly fast program, especially compared to something like VOBSE.

Tweak and then save the resultant text in whatever format you like. For TextSub, Subviewer2 seems to work well and be fairly configurable. (this next step is something i could have done with knowing) KEEP THE PROGRAM OPEN in case you need to add a delay or something later - Subrip can't edit existing files.

Run VFAPI on the .d2v file from DVD2AVI. So long as you have a chip with MMX or whatever (ie anything suitable for video encoding) it should take less time than it did to read this sentence. Do it while the subs are OCRing in fact.

Load the AVI into VirtualDub. Setup whatever pre-sub filters you'd like to put in place on the file (eg cropping, deinterlace, resize, bright/contrast, so on). Then add Textsub filter.

Load up the Subviewer file, go into options and tweak them as you see fit, using the Vdub output to see the changes effected (eg, size of shadow, position from the bottom - for a 224 pic in a 288 frame with 18pt text, I found that using a 15 pixel bottom margin gives one line of text just inside the black border, and one or two in the main picture, hopefully still readable on a TV).

Start the frameserver from VirtualDub File menu. Give the avi file and the signpost decent names. Don't forget to add the .vdr on the end of the signpost, because VirtualDub sure does.

Load the VDR signpost into TMPGEnc. From there on it's "as you were, soldier", treat the loaded file as a downloaded, high quality, very slow to decode AVI with hardcoded subs. Do what you will with it, but generally, just plug in the bitrate / quality, make sure all the other settings are right (inc filename to encode to), and press GO.

Then go to bed, or to work. Be sure to set this up as the last thing of an evening/first in morning, unless e.g. you have a 3.4ghz multithreading chip...

30 minutes down, 9h00 left to run, encoding to CQ with 850mhz and a 103 minute film.

Wish me luck, I haven't even got a jap soundtrack or "proper" non-subbed video stream prepped yet. Gonna do a double test and check that the english sound and subbed vid work properly on the DVD player
(i'm trying to get that 103 minutes inside of ~72-74 disc minutes too... got a DVDextra "original trailer" and a music video to squeeze into the rest of the space.. 103 mins in 72 disc mins, at a rez fairly close to fullscreen NTSC.. may have to call on kwag for this one)

urk, good job I cuttypasted that, had been logged out

[sterno]

I've had mixed results with subrip's OCR. Some subtitles require almost no manual intervention, others still have me typing letters every 5-10 lines at the end of the movie and have a lot of errors. I think it's just because of the poor quality of a lot of subtitles - if you look at the subtitles on DVDs from several different sources you'll find a lot of variation in how clear they are.

Sometime you really should sit down and try to sort out what's wrong with avisynth. If you use it a while you'll end up with scripts for all your common tasks so you can just copy/paste and change filenames, plus it's easier to batch-encode with AVS scripts than with VirtualDub. I think one thing I ran in to that cause me some strange problems was that I tried DVD2SVCD and it installed its own version of avisynth (which replaced mine in the registry), which wasn't entirely compatible with the version I was using.

[EddyH]

Well as this is my first time with it i'd say it's a positive experience. By the time it was about halfway thru, was only having to tend to it every 5m of film time or so; the last quarter zipped thru without any intervention at all. The only cleanups needed were changing a few doubled apostrophes to quotes (there's actually an option to do that, but i forgot it ), fixing a few errors that actually were part of the original DVD ("the wall street crash of 927".. etc, careless typos), splitting an obtrusive, thin 3-liner to two wider lines, and maybe even a couple things that SubRip itself screwed up

Compared to VOBSE, which needed tending all the way thru to the end - it kept throwing fits such as thinking the subs were three shades of white on black, rather than yellow on black and orange as the transparency.. hence lots of cockups, and kept detecting letters as merged together/lines misaligned/getting spacing totally wierd... etc... no such probs with SubRip, and it was at least 4 times faster at pretty much everything to boot, even when an encode was running in the background.

It may get worse on other discs, when I find reason to rip the subs (the only other disc so far where that'd be necessary is Crouching Tiger i guess), which may not use such a clear, 100% unique letters font as Comic Sans 20pt!

As for avisynth, I think I'll leave it for now until I come across some problem that I *really* can't solve without it. I'll send you a videophone message from my retirement villa on the moon when that happens Come on, what can it do that VDub/TMPG can't? No seriously, tell me..

Rarely batch encode stuff, usually when I do it's different parts of the same film in TMPGenc, or a lot of things straight thru to bog standard VCD.. hm. And I don't have DVD2VCD.. that I know of.. so not sure what's up with it not reading the AVS.