2 subtitles at once

[crossmr]

I need to be able to display 2 subtitles at once. Is this possible? My only thinking is to make one hard then use vobsub to position the other one in another place. I'm sure there must be an easier way to do it.
Any ideas?

[jman98]

This is actually a useful idea and I am just completely mystified as to why the DVD Forum guys never made the DVD standard support it.

Do you want to do this on a PC or a standalone DVD player? There might be a way to do it on a PC, but on a standalone DVD player it's going to be ugly.
On a standalone, one of these methods should work. Perhaps you'll get more comments from people who've actually done this.
1) Rip both subtitles in SRT format and assuming your PC can correctly display BOTH languages, you can manually combine both languages into a new SRT file and re-author a DVD with that SRT file, converting it to another subtitle format if necessary. I've read about people who have done this and it is said to work.
2) Hard sub both, making sure that they don't overlap. Don't know if you'll have to encode twice (yuck!) to do this though.
3) Hard sub one and like you said make the other so it doesn't appear on top of the hard subbed one, but my understanding is that some DVD players may ignore the specifications for subtitle placement anyway. This method would be the most difficult to do and the least likely to work correctly.

Note that most subtitle tools do NOT work correctly with Unicode, so if your entire strategy depends on this, it most likely won't work.

[crossmr]

I can display both languages, that's no problem. Basically I want to watch a chinese movie with my korean girlfriend.. her english isn't bad..but not quite good enough to keep up with the English subtitles at the speed they go. So I need to display english and Korean at the same time, it'll be done on a PC.

Combining the subs doesn't seem like a bad idea, but my korean isn't quite good enough to make sure I didn't mess that up. I know in media player classic I've had it accidentally show subtitles twice (MPC shows the subs and vobsub also overlays them) so I wonder if I could show them with vobsub and then force MPC to load another set up subtitles.

[p_l]

Have you considered placing the Korean subs on the right side of the video frame, vertically from top to bottom, since Korean can be written in vertical columns running from top to bottom and right to left? I saw this in a Japanese movie theater once, since Japanese (and Chinese) can also be written this way. The English subs were from left to right along the bottom of the screen, as usual.

[Midzuki]

Have you considered placing the Korean subs on the right side of the video frame, vertically from top to bottom, since Korean can be written in vertical columns running from top to bottom and right to left? I saw this in a Japanese movie theater once, since Japanese (and Chinese) can also be written this way. The English subs were from left to right along the bottom of the screen, as usual.

The idea sounds very interesting --- but do you know any subtitle software which supports
vertical display of CJK text

[Squash]

KMPlayer has a lot of options for displaying multiple subs. If they're in an idx/sub pair, just right click on the video screen, then "Subtitles...Subtitle languages...2nd subtitle", and pick your other language.

If you have 2 .srt files, right-click the screen, then "Subtitles...Add multiple subtitles" and choose your korean subtitle. The dialog will close, so right-click on screen again and "Subtitles...Subtitle languages...2nd subtitle", then click on your korean sub. You should then have Korean on top, English on the bottom.

Something like that, anyway. There's lots of options for sub alignment to play with, but I don't know if they apply to multiple subs.

Some other players can probably do this, too. I only know about KMPlayer doing it because I stumbled across it when I was playing with the settings and ended up with subs in about 4 different languages on the screen at once.

[crossmr]

Thanks guys. I have kmplayer installed. I'll try that one.