Show .mpg subtitles on wmc and wmp

[danage]

Hi All!

I have been converting my dvd collection into high quality .mpg's using vob2mgp, the subtitle tracks are being hard-coded into the .mpg and I can enable and see the subs using VLC player. However, with windows media centre and player set to show subtitles if available, no subtitles are displayed and I cannot figure out why? What I would like to do is stream my media to the xbox 360 which at the moment seems to work well but again there is no subtitles visible. I have the full subtitle tracks although I am only interested in force subs which I could adjust using dvdsubedit before converting to .mpg.

my question is, how can I display the subtitles straight from the mpg or a separate file using windows media centre or player ?

Thanks in advance!

[aedipuss]

guess you are not hard coding the subs. that would be re-encoding them permanently into the video. if you are just putting them in the mpeg container with the video and audio then that's your problem. mpeg container support of subs is almost non-existent.

[danage]

Hi Aedipuss

The subtitle tracks are hard-coded into the .mpg (according to vob2mpg), they display fine when playing in VLC player, but I get nothing in Windows media player and I don't know why?

[Ai Haibara]

Hard-coded subtitles are a part of the actual video data itself, not muxed into the video container. It's like the text and logos your local news station places over the picture when you're watching the news - it's then a part of the picture, and you can't switch it on or off to see the what they're obscuring, no matter which hardware you use. The same holds true for hard-coded subs - it's actually a part of the picture, and it'll always be there when you play the video.

Soft-subs are the ones you can switch off, and that your player may or may not display properly. If you can save the subtitles to an external file, and give them the same name as the video (video.mpg, video.srt, for example), do they display?

Can't say I know how well the XBox360 supports subtitles (internal or external), though. It may simply not support them all that well.

[usually_quiet]

Hi Aedipuss

The subtitle tracks are hard-coded into the .mpg (according to vob2mpg), they display fine when playing in VLC player, but I get nothing in Windows media player and I don't know why?

The .mpg files the current release of VOB2MPG creates are unusual because it muxes all the video, audio, and subpicture subtitle streams in the VOBs into the .mpg file it outputs.

Windows Media Player is a fairly basic media player. Since .mpg files normally do not include any subtitles or multiple audio streams, it is not surprising that Windows Media Player does not know what to do with the multiplexed subtitles in the .mpgs produced by VOB2MPG. VLC on the other hand is designed to play a much wider variety of media files, and has the ability to handle atypical .mpg files.

[El Heggunte]

Windows Media Player was designed to deal with only two types of "embedded" subtitles:

1) RLE-bitmaps in DVD-video ;

2) "Script commands" in an ASF/WMV file ;

Bottom-line is, friends don't let friends use Windows Media Player

[danage]

Thanks for your replys

I am now a little stuck, the main purpose of using .mpg is so I can have DVD quality that's is stored in a single file and playable on windows media centre besides streaming to the xbox 360. However, because the subtitles are not visible and thanks to those who have explained I now know why I don't know what to do. Can anyone give me any ideas? I'm now looking for a format which is direct DVD quality with ac3 and subs that is combatible with the two above? Is there a program which can hard-code the subs into mpg format? Maybe this would work? since I'm only interested in force subs.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: To overcome this issue I used VobSub to extract the force subtitles from the original .vob's then burnt them in using avidemux resulting in a DVD quality .mpg streamable to the xbox 360 with visible forced subtitles