Overwriting subtitles

[lejes]

Hi all!

I've been working on a set of subtitles from a dvd movie I own, and I've modified them and converted them too .SSA in Maestro, and did my configs, positionings, and generated the BMPs from there.

Here's the thing. I have the original DVD copied onto my hard drive, and I want to make it so that when I burn it into a new DVD-r, the DVD's ENGLISH subs will be overwritten by my newly made subs that I was working on. So in the menu, when the user chooses to use English subs, the viewer will see my subs and not the one the original DVD had.

How would I go by doing this?
I think I have to do some reauthoring involving the DVD files on my hard drive and the BMP's that I have...
Anyway, how would you go by doing this? (Please feel free to describe using any software/tool you are familiar with -- but easier is better).


Thanks in advance.

[SaSi]

My understanding is that you want to replace the original English subtitles with the ones you made. As the subtitles are multiplexed into the VOB files, what needs to be done is demuxing the VOB files into their elements and replacing the english subtitles with the new ones. Of course, this is easier said than done. There are lots of things to take care of and perhaps there is no such tool.

The subpictures are stored in a certain format, not bmp, plus the VOB file has information additional to the audio, video and subpicture streams.

A wild guess would be to check out programs like VOBEdit or VOBRator. They do VOB editing and demux-remuxing, so they may be of use.

Otherwise, the straightforward approach would be to re-author. Doing that for the whole DVD structure (including introductory sequences, interactive menus, etc), is an overwhelming task. Doing it for the movie only, is easier.

The suggested steps are:
1. Use a tool like DVD2One to create a single movie DVD containing only the video stream and the audio and subtititle streams you want to keep. Include the English subtitle stream in it, to help the tool calculate disk space correctly (although subtitles take very little space).
2. Demux the streams with Smartripper into the video and audio streams.
3. Extract any additional subpicture streams (other than the English ones you are going to replace) with a tool like SubRip. Tell SubRip to store the subtitles in a format comptible with the authoring tool you are going to use.
4. Use an authoring tool like Scenarist, RellDVD or Maestro (the only ones to my knowledge that support subtitles) to author a new DVD out of the assets you have.

[lejes]

I was hoping to keep all the menus and stuff from the original though...

Since I have the DVD files on my hard drive, my plan was to somehow replace the built in english subs to my english subs, then burn it (it will all fit on one dvd-r).

Isn't there a way to do this without sacrifice?

And the BMP's I have are from when I was using Maestro. I'm working with .ssa files (and wish to continue using that since Maestro lets me have lonts of subtitle options i want) and then i just generated them into bmps.

[Vejita-sama]

The problem is in the re-authoring step. Basically you can not (easily) use DVD Maestro for this. You would have to re-create/re-author the whole DVD! Every title, all the connections, everything. That's a huge pain in the ass.

What you really want to do is demux the VOB, and replace your subtitles with the old ones. In theory this should be easy, but in practice I don't know any programs to generate a subtitle stream from a SSA file, or mux a VOB file with a subtitle stream.

So here's what I suggest, only re-author the main movie. Here's a guide to help with the process:

http://www.doom9.org/mpg/maestro2.htm

1) Rip the DVD to the HD. Determine which VOB title set has the main movie (hope that it's all one PCG [program chain] or this gets more complicated)

2) Demux the VOB to all it's elementary streams. Use chapter extractor to determine the chapter time points.

3) Load the m2v and all ac3 streams in DVD maestro. Load the chapters timepoints. Load your new subtitles (and any old subtitle streams as well)

4) Author a new VOB/titleset

5) From the original ripped DVD, delete the VOB with the main movie (but not the VTS_xx_0.VOB or it's IFO file). Then re-name the newly authored VOB to the same titleset, and copy them into the original rip's folder.

6) Run IFO-update, this corrects all pointers in the IFO such that your chapters now line up correctly with your scene selection menu!

That might sounds confusing but the guide mostly walks your through it (actually it assumes you want to re-encode with CCE prior to re-authoring with Maestro so you can skip that part).

[lejes]

So what you're suggesting is that I just concentrate on working with the movie, and insert that into the rest of the ripped files so it'll be like the original, and have the links updated....
hmmm... great idea.

Thanks for the info.

This is exactly the kind of information I was hoping for (thanks for the step by step instructions--they'll help a lot).

I'm not familiar with DVD Maestro at all, but the link to the guide you showed me is nicely done and I'll hopefully figure it out when I get the chance to give it a try.