are Forced Subs a seperate stream ?

[scottb721]

I've worked out how to do permanent subs on my SVCD using DVD2AVI - VFAPI - VOBSUB - VirtualDub not that I'd use them, BUT,
If a DVD uses forced subs, is this a seperate sub stream or is it a trick that is done by the player using the primary English sub stream ?

If it is part of the main english sub how do I get only the forced subs to show?

Thanks

[adam]

They are a part of the main language subs. In the authoring program you can select a particular part of the sub stream, basically one of the bmp's you are working with, and set it to forced. The DVD player will now always play this particular sub.

I use DoItFast4U to prepare all of my assets and it automatically extracts the forced subs as a separate stream. You can then author it as a separate stream if you want, but that's no really very practical. You would have to turn that stream on everytime you played the movie, but I think this is the only way to do it with the lower end authoring programs because they don't support true forced subs.

The best way to backup a dvd with forced subs, assuming your authoring program can set forced subs, is to rip both the main audio subs and the forced subs. Then you load them both into the authoring program, scroll through and look for any subs in the forced sub stream. Then set the corresponding sub in the main stream to true. Do this for the whole movie and then remove the forced sub stream. Usually there aren't many forced subs so this only takes a few seconds. This is how I do forced subs in Scenarist. DVD Maestro may be able to do this too, but I'm not sure. Other than that, I have no idea which programs allow you to do this.