Why are subtitles such a pain in the ass?

[gadgetman18i3]

Hi everyone... I'm a slight newbie at the whole DVD ripping scene.. but I think I understand it for the most part, so I'm just wondering what I'm doing wrong.
I've gone through about four programs trying to get this to work the way I want it... but here's my explanation for what I've done.

I'm trying to rip a copy of Knockin' on Heaven's Door.. the Cowboy Bebop movie. But it's only available in Japan.. so the entire movie is in Japanese. Now.. I have a NTSC version of the film on DVD.. with Chinese and English subtitles.

I'm trying to rip it with the English subtitles, btw.

Now.. the first thing I tried was using Smartripper and then DVDx 2.0 . And well... it works, for the most part. But there are all these weird gaps in the audio that I can't seem to get rid of. And I've tried just about everything.. so I gave up on that.

Second thing I tried was using DUP-DVD.. and directly copying from the DVD drive straight to the CDRW drive.. but that took too long.. and it froze up after about twenty hours of trying to make my first CD image.

Third thing I tried was using cladDVDXP and then using DVDx 2.0 again.. but I had the same problem I did the first time. Excellent video quality.. and the subtitles were there.. but small, yet highly noticible gaps in the audio.

Last thing I tried was using DVD2SVCD with DVD2AVI and then using TMPGEnc. I ripped the subtitles, and from what I thought I read it was going to integrate them into the rip.. so I figured TMPGEnc was going to rip them with it.. but I haven't been able to find my DVD remote.. so I'm not sure if it didn't rip them, or if it did and I have to turn on the subtitles. This was the best quality rip, btw. It was perfectly awesome.. so now TMPGEnc is my favorite encoder..

If only it could encode subtitles though...

So anyway, I don't know if I've done something wrong here or not with DVDx 2.0... or if DVD2SVCD with TMPGEnc did work and rip the subtitles, but maybe I'm just not turning them on when I use my DVD player.. or what. But if you guys could give me some advice.. I would really, really, really appreciate it.

Sorry for being such a n00b...

[Gazorgan]

In DVD2SVCD, under subtitles, you want to the option all the way to the right on the top, permanent subtitles. Works every time (make sure to select English as the subtitle). I haven't had a problem yet get beautiful subtitles(especially on 16:9 letterbox) on all manners of encodes.

If you want AVI instead of SVCD, then work with the demuxed audio and video that TMPG encodes.

[gadgetman18i3]

Oh um... I probably should have mentioned that I did put it on permanent subtitles... and it didn't work. *sigh* I blame my computer.

No cookie for you, you dumb computer.. *kicks computer*