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  1. Member
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    I'm on Windows 7 and I am trying to do a parody translation of Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone in my language (just translated an srt file that was in English). After this I can drag the srt file to MPC and the subtitles appear alright. But problems arise when I try to hardcode the srt with original mkv to produce an avi.

    The language is Oriya (odia) and support for it had been notoriously bad until Vista. Now, if I use Format Factory, in the resulting avi the characters appear correct, but the vowels are misplaced, just what used to happen on XP system wide. I thought maybe converting to image format subtitles will help. But most converters including Subtitle Workshop refuse to load or convert into junk characters. After trying about 20 subtitle handling software, only Aegisub and Subtitle Edit handle it right. The former has no option for exporting to SUB/IDX format, the latter converts correctly to text formats like .ass or .ssa but when I export to SUB/IDX, the vowels are misplaced again.

    I have found one software called Advanced Subtitler that converts to a bunch of .png and an .sst file. I don't know how to handle this Sonic Scenarist file though.

    The only two methods that work right now are
    1)Use a symbol/ANSI font rather than Unicode. That will be a lot of work to rewrite the srt file again.
    2)I can hardcode the .ssa output I get from Subtitle Edit onto the video with Virtual Dub. This works, but apart from the normal text, a lot of junk characters also appear around the subtitles. Any fixes?
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  2. Originally Posted by coldbreeze16m View Post
    I have found one software called Advanced Subtitler that converts to a bunch of .png and an .sst file.
    Every SST I've ever seen had associated BMPs, and not PNGs.

    However, if they're real SST files, they can be authored for DVD using Muxman. You'll need a BMP of something or other (doesn't matter what, but it has to be 720x480/576) and you'll need a DVD compliant audio file at least the length of the subs.

    Then, author, and extract the SUP subtitle file from your DVD using PGCDemux. That SUP file can be instantly converted to VobSubs (IDX/SUB) using SubtitleCreator.

    Another way is to open an SSA file in MaestroSBT and export in SON format. Son2VSub then gives you IDX/SUB. I have no idea, though, how MaestroSBT handles your language.

    SubtitleCreator is also supposed to be able to create IDX/SUB from SRT subs, but maybe you tried that one already.
    Last edited by manono; 8th Oct 2012 at 15:11.
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    I have tried MaestroSBT. Trying to open the SSA file as UTF-8 gives an error "Error converting UTF-8 data" clicking ok gives another dialog box "The parameter is incorrect". Opening the SSA normally in MaestroSBT produces files with junk characters.

    I did download MuxMan earlier but had put it away as a last option. Think I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the suggestion. I shall be back on how it went.

    PS: Yes, the files were BMP, not PNG. My mistake.
    Last edited by coldbreeze16m; 8th Oct 2012 at 13:57.
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    No luck with those SST produced by Advanced subtitler. I used a 720 X 576 bmp image and the audio ripped from the video and converted to AC3 with SUPER. Finally fed it the SST sitting in the folder with multiple BMPs and and one file called subtitles_BDN.xml. It did produce a DVD video. VLC shows the VOB output does have a subtitle stream (Video>Subtitles Track>Track 1) so does MPC, but neither are showing any subtitles. Any ideas?
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  5. Maybe the SST subs weren't accepted by Muxman. You can check the root of the 'C' drive for the Muxman log to confirm.

    SST files for DVD have several restrictions. The most common mistake is not making them 4-bit (16) color. I don't know if you're NTSC or PAL. My NTSC BMPs are 169KB in size. PAL ones are 201KB. If you used more colors, the BMPs will be larger.

    However, if the subs were produced, you should be able to extract them from your DVD using PGCDemux to get the SUP file. Then you can have a look at them in SUPViewer or SubtitleCreator, and if they're OK use SubtitleCreator to convert them to VobSubs.
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    I have successfully hardcoded Simplified Chinese subtitles using Xvid4PSP. I have only used SRT subs as input, so I don't know if this will work with other formats. The process was very easy.
    1) Save the subtitles to a Unicode text file.
    2) Start Xvid4PSP and set the output as you desire (AVI in my case) and tell it to the use the subtitle file you just created.

    This really should work with your Oriya files. By the way, I had to look up Oriya. I've heard of several Indian languages, but that was a new one for me.
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    Originally Posted by coldbreeze16m View Post
    .......

    The language is Oriya (odia) and support for it had been notoriously bad until Vista. Now, if I use Format Factory, in the resulting avi the characters appear correct, but the vowels are misplaced, just what used to happen on XP system wide.

    ........
    Unlikely that the source of the problem was in the OS itself (Vista or XP). There have been *buggy fonts*, which do not fully-comply to the Unicode specs. Besides, fonts are not locked to this or to that operating system. I have happily installed fonts from Windows Vista and Windows 7 onto my XP machine, FWIW.

    OK, I know this is not an answer to your question, but it's always good and necessary to stop the spreading of misinformation.
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    Originally Posted by manono View Post
    Maybe the SST subs weren't accepted by Muxman. You can check the root of the 'C' drive for the Muxman log to confirm.

    SST files for DVD have several restrictions. The most common mistake is not making them 4-bit (16) color. I don't know if you're NTSC or PAL. My NTSC BMPs are 169KB in size. PAL ones are 201KB. If you used more colors, the BMPs will be larger.

    However, if the subs were produced, you should be able to extract them from your DVD using PGCDemux to get the SUP file. Then you can have a look at them in SUPViewer or SubtitleCreator, and if they're OK use SubtitleCreator to convert them to VobSubs.
    There were no log files in root of C drive or the folder where MuxMan is or output directory.

    There yes! Advanced Subtitler was producing the bitmaps in 8 bit (404 KB) in 720 X 576 resolution (a PAL one), so that demuxing the DVD files by PGC demux produced Videofile.m2v, AudioFile_80.AC3, Celltimes.txt and LogFile.txt
    I changed settings to output to 4 bit bitmaps. This time demuxing the resultant DVD files produced an additional Subpicture.sup . I immediately converted it to SUB/IDX and hardcoded into AVI.

    Success? Not yet! Some dialogues appear while in case of others there's only a black box. Some bitmaps have gone astray. Backtracking it seems the .SUP file itself is lacking these bitmaps because the relevant BMP files are sitting alright in the SST folder. Something wrong with either MuxMan or PGCdemux. I'm using MuxMan 0.16 from 15 Oct 2005. Could that be a reason?
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    Thank you jman98, I will try out that software and let you know. Unfortunately Chinese is well supported despite the complexity but Oriya is a rather rare language to find in digital space

    @El Heggunte, as far as I know the OS itself (XP) has had problems. Fonts can't be blamed. Indic scripts are pretty complex. In Oriya for example when you write "je" you write "j" and then "e". The diacritical mark for the vowel sound "e" is actually placed before "j" so that it looks like "ej". This is what most systems get wrong, they show it as "je", same with other vowels.

    I migrated to Win 7 only last year after I bought a new laptop with Win 7 preloaded. Till then I used XP. I had tried installing Unicode fonts from Win 7 "Kalinga.ttf" as well as others (code2000, Raghava, Ori1Uni). They show the glyphs but the vowel placement is always wrong. This is a systemwide problem, some patches fix a couple programs, notably FireFox but not others. So yes, OS has a role here. I'm struggling to get Hindi displayed properly on my Android device currently. The problem here is also the same, misplaced vowels. iOS and Symbian had supported Hindi (the 3rd most spoken language of world) but not Android. Pango > Harfbuzz hasn't fixed it either. So that isn't misinformation.
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    Originally Posted by coldbreeze16m View Post
    Thank you jman98, I will try out that software and let you know. Unfortunately Chinese is well supported despite the complexity but Oriya is a rather rare language to find in digital space
    Actually, getting Chinese to work is an absolute nightmare on a typical American English installation of Windows, so the fact that I was able to do this should mean that you can too. Just remember that you need a Unicode encoded text file of your subtitles to work from. If you don't have a copy of Microsoft Office that can save Unicode encoded text files then I recommend installing the free Libre Office program.
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    Hmmm, I wasn't aware that the Unicode "engine" of Windows XP was partially/selectively broken

    But thanks for well-informing the uninformed (me, as the case seems to be).

    Originally Posted by coldbreeze16m View Post
    .......

    @El Heggunte, as far as I know the OS itself (XP) has had problems. Fonts can't be blamed. Indic scripts are pretty complex. In Oriya for example when you write "je" you write "j" and then "e". The diacritical mark for the vowel sound "e" is actually placed before "j" so that it looks like "ej". This is what most systems get wrong, they show it as "je", same with other vowels.

    I migrated to Win 7 only last year after I bought a new laptop with Win 7 preloaded. Till then I used XP. I had tried installing Unicode fonts from Win 7 "Kalinga.ttf" as well as others (code2000, Raghava, Ori1Uni). They show the glyphs but the vowel placement is always wrong. This is a systemwide problem, some patches fix a couple programs, notably FireFox but not others. So yes, OS has a role here. I'm struggling to get Hindi displayed properly on my Android device currently. The problem here is also the same, misplaced vowels. iOS and Symbian had supported Hindi (the 3rd most spoken language of world) but not Android. Pango > Harfbuzz hasn't fixed it either. So that isn't misinformation.
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    Originally Posted by jman98 View Post
    Originally Posted by coldbreeze16m View Post
    Thank you jman98, I will try out that software and let you know. Unfortunately Chinese is well supported despite the complexity but Oriya is a rather rare language to find in digital space
    Actually, getting Chinese to work is an absolute nightmare on a typical American English installation of Windows, so the fact that I was able to do this should mean that you can too. Just remember that you need a Unicode encoded text file of your subtitles to work from. If you don't have a copy of Microsoft Office that can save Unicode encoded text files then I recommend installing the free Libre Office program.
    My friend from China used to send me simple stuff written in simplified Chinese on MSN back in days when it was called MSN messenger, it used to work. But since I never got far from ni hao, I don't know

    Libre Office 3.4 handled my unicode files pretty badly, though I still have it. I hardly ever need to format my text, so I rely on Notepad++ or when I do, WordPad's RTF is fine enough. KISS FTW!
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    Just confirming that I was wrong ...

    Knowledge Base - Indic Unicode issues in Windows

    The following issues with Windows XP's implementation of Indian languages were noticed during Baraha development. Some of these issues have been fixed in the later versions of Windows.
    [ continue: http://www.baraha.com/help/kb/unicode_issues.htm ]

    As always, Microsoft cares about all things that are un-important...

    Gayish user interface? YES !

    Collection of .NET frameworks? YES !!

    Proper Unicode support? NO !!!

    [ /END-OF-RANT-MODE, "apologies" for my "groundless" anti-M$ "trolling" ]
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    Originally Posted by El Heggunte View Post
    Just confirming that I was wrong ...

    Knowledge Base - Indic Unicode issues in Windows

    The following issues with Windows XP's implementation of Indian languages were noticed during Baraha development. Some of these issues have been fixed in the later versions of Windows.
    [ continue: http://www.baraha.com/help/kb/unicode_issues.htm ]

    As always, Microsoft cares about all things that are un-important...

    Gayish user interface? YES !

    Collection of .NET frameworks? YES !!

    Proper Unicode support? NO !!!

    [ /END-OF-RANT-MODE, "apologies" for my "groundless" anti-M$ "trolling" ]
    The poor unicode support was the reason I used to dual boot Ubuntu, just for editing and browsing texts in Oriya. Until 1.5 years back I was one of the only 3 active contributor to Oriya wikipedia (Still in infacy) and had to use Linux just for posting/editing Oriya on Wikipedia.

    I can also rant all day about M$ and their evil policies to take over the world but the thing is, they get a lot of things right that Linux doesn't. Maybe that's just my perspective.
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  15. Originally Posted by coldbreeze16m View Post
    Some dialogues appear while in case of others there's only a black box.
    That is very odd. I have added subs to several thousand Muxman authored DVDs and never had that happen.
    Something wrong with either MuxMan or PGCdemux.
    That's easy enough to diagnose. Just play the DVD with a software DVD player and go to one of the places where the black box is. If there's no sub, it's Muxman's doing. If there is a sub, then it's lost when demuxing (which I'd find hard to believe). In fact, I'd be inclined to think there's a different reason for it, although I don't know what it is. Is there any overlapping of subs?

    In any event, it can be fixed, although I realize you shouldn't have to jump through all these hoops just to add subs to a DVD.

    Open the DVD in DVDSubEdit ('Open Full Domain'). Then scroll to all the blank BMPs and replace them all with the correct one from the SST file (File->Replace Current Subpic With BMP file'). You can more easily figure out which are the ones needing replacing by opening the SUP file in SubtitleCreator and scrolling down to find all the blank ones (I think).

    If the subs are there when playing the DVD (which I doubt, but who knows until you try?), you can extract the VobSubs directly using VobSub Configure (comes included with the VobSub package). Open the IFO and let it do its thing. At the same time you can 'fix' the colors. You can also check the VobSubs for blank ones by opening them in either SubtitleCreator or SubResynch (included in the VobSub package).
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    Originally Posted by manono View Post
    Originally Posted by coldbreeze16m View Post
    Some dialogues appear while in case of others there's only a black box.
    That is very odd. I have added subs to several thousand Muxman authored DVDs and never had that happen.
    Something wrong with either MuxMan or PGCdemux.
    That's easy enough to diagnose. Just play the DVD with a software DVD player and go to one of the places where the black box is. If there's no sub, it's Muxman's doing. If there is a sub, then it's lost when demuxing (which I'd find hard to believe). In fact, I'd be inclined to think there's a different reason for it, although I don't know what it is. Is there any overlapping of subs?

    In any event, it can be fixed, although I realize you shouldn't have to jump through all these hoops just to add subs to a DVD.

    Open the DVD in DVDSubEdit ('Open Full Domain'). Then scroll to all the blank BMPs and replace them all with the correct one from the SST file (File->Replace Current Subpic With BMP file'). You can more easily figure out which are the ones needing replacing by opening the SUP file in SubtitleCreator and scrolling down to find all the blank ones (I think).

    If the subs are there when playing the DVD (which I doubt, but who knows until you try?), you can extract the VobSubs directly using VobSub Configure (comes included with the VobSub package). Open the IFO and let it do its thing. At the same time you can 'fix' the colors. You can also check the VobSubs for blank ones by opening them in either SubtitleCreator or SubResynch (included in the VobSub package).
    Well here is more oddness. I of course did try that method of playing the DVD video in MPC and VLC, but neither would show the subtitles (even after selecting the subtitle track), but apparently a Subpicture.SUP could be ripped off it (And I wasn't playing just the .VOB, I was playing the whole folder) Click image for larger version

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    And that's not the end of madness! I used MuxMan to produce the DVD files again as I had deleted them, and this time I just used another 720X576 image as video source. Shouldn't make any difference, right? But it did! This time, the Subpics.SUP had all the dialogues, however the rogue ones which were missing earlier still look different with white text on opaque black background unlike others which are on transparent background Click image for larger version

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ID:	14199. See, one of the rogue dialogues is selected. However I can live with these awkward ones, something is better than nothing. Thankfully I didn't have to use DVD SubEdit to replace the images manually.

    It's really tedious to go through all these steps, so I really do hope Subtitle Edit gets the job done when it's updated. I've written to Nikolaj Olsson, the author of Subtitle Edit and he asked me for screenshots and the original SRT. Maybe he'll be able to fix it.

    And again thanks for all the help you've given me manono
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  17. Originally Posted by coldbreeze16m View Post
    And again thanks for all the help you've given me manono
    You're welcome, but is this one time I'm sorry (or maybe thankful) my native language is English, as I don't know any of that Unicode stuff and thus can't help others as I can with other subjects.

    You should be able to make the background color for all the subs transparent in DVDSubEdit.

    And, as I think you already know, once you convert the SUPs to VobSubs, you can make the 'final' colors whatever you like in VobSub Configure.
    Last edited by manono; 9th Oct 2012 at 23:47.
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