converting AVI & Subtitles

[halw]

I tried to convert an AVI file with sub file using the procedure described in previously in this Forum; using the subtitle menu under Filters.
I can see the result in Preview and it looks perfect. However the converted file shows up as name.avi.ff.mpg; never converts to Video-TS folder; and the log shows that the sub file could not be loaded.
I'm using PPC Mac with System OSX 10.5

Any suggestions?

[Case]

What is the format of the sub file?
Unfortunately, the ".sub" suffix is used by multiple kinds of subtitle files, both text-based and image-based. Text-based subtitles can be opened in TextEdit, where you can read the subtitle lines. Text-based subtitles are small, usually under 200 KB. Image based subtitles are large, usually over 2 MB.

Three text-based subtitle file formats with suffix ".sub" are: SubViewer, MPSub, and MicroDVD. They are not very common, but SubViewer is seen more than the other two. (The most popular text-based subtitle format still is SubRip, which uses the ".srt" suffix.)

One image-based subtitle file format that has files with a ".sub" suffix is VobSub. VobSub subtitles come in a set of ".sub" and ".idx". These are quite common, as they are easy to extract from DVDs. (A DVD subtitle stream is images and it does not have to be OCR'ed and spell-checked when extracted to an image-based subtitle file.)

You can't use a ffmpegX conversion to DVD using external VobSub subtitles, as that requires text-based subtitles.

The easiest solution is to find a matching .srt (SubRip) text based subtitle on one of the subtitle search sites (1) (2).

The hard solution is to combine the AVI with the VobSub in a MKV container, which then can be converted with ffmpegX, but the subs will be permanent (burned onto the video) then.