TmpgEnc + mkv (renamed to .avi) + .ass + ffdshow - DirectVobSub = Insanity

[Sumgai]

I've been searching alot and couldn't find a solution to my problem. Please listen:

First of all, I'll start with my sucess in finally figuring out how to encode an .mkv to mpeg II using TmpgEnc. (using haali media splitter and ffdshow and upping directshow priority in TmpgEnc)

Unfortunatly, my problems didn't end there. Normally when I watch an .mkv (with subtitles in the .mkv- I'm assuming these would be called "embedded subtitles"?) using windows media player a haali icon, directvobsub (that lovely green arrow), and ffdshow icon automaticaly appear in the taskbar. I usually rely on directvobsub to show my subtitles.
However, when encoding to DVD format with TmpgEnc, all but the directvobsub icon show up on the taskbar. Now at first I thought, "No big deal, I'll simply tell ffdshow to display the subtitles". As I watched the encode preview it seemed to work out just fine untill I noticed strange symbols in the place of puncuation and what appeared to be the subtitler's notes (which wouldn't normally show up) appearing on the screen. In some cases text surounded by certain puncuation would completely vanish. Although some sentences turn out fine, this basically makes the subtitles unreadable.

For the hell of it, I tore apart my .mkv's that had this problem and noticed that they all included ".ass" subtitle files. I concluded that ffdshow doesn't know how to display .ass properly and that I hate .ass subtitles (They have a pretty stupid extension as well). I tried to convert .ass to .srt but that lead to even more problems.

So, here are my questions:

1) Is it a fact that ffdshow doesn't know how to display ".ass" subtitles?
2) Is there anything I can to make them display properly with ffdshow?
3) Why doesn't directvobsub load with TmpgEnc, Is it possible to make it so?
4) Does anyone else have this problem?

Please help me. I want that little green arrow.

[celtic_druid]

ffdshow probably doesn't fully support ass subs, but then DVobSub won't display them properly unless you disable caching either. Weird symbols is generally a result of wrong character encoding though.

TMPGEnc's directshow input as never the best. In the past I have often noticed things failing to render that would render fine in say graphedit. Sometimes changing output colourspaces would help, but directvobsub was just one of those filters that would either not work at all or display only some subs.

You could try using VSFilter via AVISynth instead of dvobsub and frameserving to TMPGEnc. Then again perhaps just directshowsource() would be enough to get things working.

[Sumgai]

I tried avisynth, for some reason tmpgenc encounters an error and needs to be shut down whenever I try to load an avs. Although it's probably just me doing something wrong, as I don't fully understand how to use avisynth and to frameserve yet.

Funny thing is, and I'm not really sure what I did, but directvobsub seems to be working just fine on tmpgenc now. All of a sudden the green arrow appears when I encode with tmpgenc and the subtitles show exactly as they do when watching on windows media player.

I mysteriously solved this problem thats been driving me nuts for the past few days, and I don't even know how I did it. Aside from downloading vsfilter.dll, avisynth (although I didn't really use it at all), and avi2dvd (for some reason I don't really know why)...any ideas of what I may have done to have directvobsub run with tmpgenc ? One thing I do notice to be different aside from directvobsub loading when I run tmpgenc is that the haali icon doesn't appear anymore.

I'm really confused but I guess it's alright as long as it works. I guess i really have gone insane.

[celtic_druid]

Well I guess you could be using Gabest's mkv splitter now, however I don't know why that would suddenly happen. If you registered vsfilter, then that would have updated dvobsub.