Can I rip subtitles with an absolute timecode?

[krgermane]

I am editing a movie for one of my friends and have run into a problem. I used SUBrip to rip the subtitles from it, but the timecode (I suppose that's what you'd call it) is relative to the chapter, and not the movie length.

Because of this, every time there is a new chapter, the time will read 00:00:01:54 or something to that effect instead of, say, 00:09:01:54 (assuming the chapter was exactly nine minutes long).

When I import these into DVD Studio Pro, it automatically sorts them according to their time. This has caused the subtitles to go no longer than the longest chapter in the movie, and has caused them to overlap quite a bit. Obviously, this is not the ideal behavior for subtitles.

Does anyone know how I can rip the subtitles independent of the chapter times? Or does anyone have another solution? Thanks.

[SaSi]

I am guessing your problem is related to the way the DVD you are ripping was authored.

Subtitles always get timing based on the start time of the title they belong to. It cannot be that their timecodes are reset for each chapter.

The only way I can think of this happening is that the DVD was authored with individual MPEG-2 files for each chapter, "concatenated" during authoring and placed in a single Titleset.

You can verify if I am correct by viewing the DVD with PowerDVD with information switched on. If whenever you cross chapter the display mentions a new title rather than a new chapter, then I'm correct.

Whether my assumption is correct or not, you may be able to bypass this problem with subrip by extracting subtitles for one chapter/title, don't save but then continue to rip the next one without reseting the timecode accumulated in the program and when done save the whole lot.

Another way to bypass the problem is to use Smart Ripper to rip each chapter individually as VOB files (with audio and subtitles included). Make notes of the exact duration of each chapter. Then use Subrip to rip the subtitles for each segment. For the first segment you just save. For each subsequent one, before saving, go to timing/speed modifications and for each segment set the start time as the sum of duration of all previous segments. Tedious, but should do the trick.

BTW, the same problem has been observed in several episode DVDs which apparently were authored in a way similar to the DVD you encountered.

[krgermane]

Thank you for your help. I checked if each chapter constituted one title, but all of the chapters are part of the same title. I did use DVD2One to compress this movie, Legend of Drunken Master, to fit on one disc, movie only. I suspect this may have something to do with it. However, the ripping programs I use on my computer (a Macintosh) crash when the original DVD is inserted. Should I just try my luck on a PC?