No sub picture with DVDFab

[loninappleton]

I have the DVDFab Platinum (older version) and want to make a rip with subtitles.
Everything looks ok and Eng subpicture with a bullet is marked on the setup screen.

I use the Generic avi file selection.

But no subtitles/sub picture gets transferred to the file.

What am I doing wrong? Is there a sequence of customization which is necessary?

I'm trying to recall if the subtitle file can be brought in with AutoGordian Knot. As I recall I got a botched job with that and the subs were all out of sync with the image so I never tried that afterward.


If there is a newer technique please advise. However I'm used to using DVDFab.

[Baldrick]

You can always use vsrip to strip out the subs from a dvd. Name them same as the avi like video.avi and video.sub/idx and most players will support them.

Or else go to the dvdfab forum and search for subtitle help.

[Hoser Rob]

My advice doesn't totally involve dvdfab, but here goes. This is how I rip dvds anyway.

Just use the free part, ie. dvdfab hd decrypter. Set the output to DVD-9 so it doesn't compress/reencode at all. Sorry, but it does not do very good encoding at all. Just copy the main movie to a folder.

Get VidCoder, which is really just Handbrake with a streamlined interface. I'd suspect some people would prefer it over handbrake because the new version of handbrake doesn't support file size target anymore. Use the dvdfab output video_ts as input. Include all subs etc.

I prefer 2 pass mode, definitely, but 1 pass constant quality mode isn't too bad.

Set the output to h.264 mkv format. Mkv is great for subs ... they're embedded within the video file. There are a few software players out there without good mkv support but there's no excuse for that. If that's a problem get a decent one that doesn't need 3rd party codecs like smplayer or vlc.

This may sound less convenient and it does involve an extra step but it's actually not slower, believe it or not. And the quality of the video will be much better.

[loninappleton]

I may try to redo with MKV.

Will also check out VidCoder. Thanks for the tip.

If it weren't for shell progs like DVDFab etc. I'd be lost. And I want to be able to control the size of the
target file to 900mb. DVDFab has a setting for that. I'm used to the user interface with DVDFab.

I'm a regular user of VLC and other freeware such as Foobar2000 for audio.

[loninappleton]

Some followup. I had some failures with Vidcoder. It looks slick and easy to use. I get the idea that failures may have come from the install of Net Framework. One error said to report to Microsoft which I just cancelled out of.

Other one was the job dropped down into the queue and told me it failed. No clear explanation of why.
The subtitle UI had multiple selections -- foreign somethingorother plus a selection for English.

Vidcoder looks like a good open source prog to move to if I can get the hang of it. I noticed a number of settings set to off and did not know if they should be set to default. Is there perhaps a guide to Vidcoder for setup that covers most jobs? I'll see if there are things under documentation at the site.

But all this why I'm reluctant to move off of known programs.

[loninappleton]

I saw something odd in looking at the source disk. It has two folders: audio TS and video TS. But the audio folder is empty. If I knew what to look for in Video TS folder that might be off I could say more.



The disk plays fine and with subs when selected through a prog menu like PowerDVD has.

Is there a way to get the info from the Video TS folder only into Vidcoder and make hard subs to the MKV?

I will seek out the Vidcoder docs but some verbal help would be appreciated.

[loninappleton]

I have a somewhat related question to this thread:

A recent avi I have has foreign subtitles which are apparently coded into the picture. The srt file I found in ENG plays ok but it cannot be read visually b/c of the previous coding job.

Can the tool mentioned above accomplish such a task?

[Baldrick]

You must blur the subs with some filters. It's not worth it. Find a better source.