Tried 4-5 different subs, never in sync with movie, tried everything

[Leecri]

Hi,
I'm really desperate here, and this is my last try at trying to figure this problem out.

OK here goes:
I've got this DVD movie and I've downloaded a Korean sub for it, I've tried absolutely all guides I could find too, and it all went smoothly at first, except the fact that the sub timing was all over the place. I tried my best to fix it at first, but finding it impossible found other subs, I've tried more than 4 subs, they were all 2cd, 3cd versions that I had to join together, and the frame rate was 23,976 and the movie is 25; I adjusted those, but was still far off. I realised it couldn't be the subs because they're all the same, but I couldn't find any solutions at all, I tried adjusting frame rates, delaying times etc, but it's impossible to fix without setting the timing for every line of the movie!
I tried adjusting these while playing the movie in subtitle workshop. What was weird though, was that everywhere else (divx player, vlc player etc) I played the first video file of the DVD (vts_01_1.vob) they all went for around 14 minutes, when I play it in subtitle workshop though it's suddenly 32 minutes. But browsing through all over topics, that might not be the minutes, but actually the frames? I don't know, and I can't even synchronise with the english version of the sub because the meanings aren't word for word.

Perhaps I might have done something wrong from the very beginning, from when I even started demuxing it, I got the file as an .img file and extracted everything with magiciso and then I followed the instructions of the guide here. I even got an error message that said the file probably had an excessive bitrate or something when I was muxing it with muxman, but anyway I'd like to solve the problem with the subtitle even more.

I've read all the other topics about subtitles and what I suspected to be something wrong with the frame rates, and I've still found no solution, and this is my very first time adding subtitles, or even trying to burn it, I've had so many new confusing words like muxing and authoring just thrown in my face, and have all these programs/tools overloading my computer.

I would really really appreciate anyone's help here, I can't give up yet, my Mum really wants to watch this, so I have to be assured there's nothing else I can do, and yes, pardon the ignorance of it all.

[träskmannen]

Synchronizinging subtitles can be a pain in the ass sometimes.

Have you still got a version of the Korean subs where you haven't modified any timings? In that case I suggest you do like this: Open the movie and make a note of the exact time when you want the first and the last sub to appear. Open the subtitle file in Subtitle Workshop and make sure that the Mode is set to "time" and not to "frames" (you choose this from a drop-down menu to the left, right beneath the menu bar).

Hit Ctrl+B. You will now be asked to fill in the time for the first and the last spoken line (format: hours:minuteseconds,thousands). Fill in the appropriate times and press Adjust! If the version of the subs fits to your version of the movie, you should now be OK. NB! Make sure that the first and the last sub in the file are the same as the first and the last spoken line. Sometimes the translators or fansubbers include copyright messages, commercials etc in the files, before and/or after the regular subtitles. Fitting such a subtitle to the time of the first and last spoken line will of course lead to disastrous timings.

If this doesn't help then I don't think there is any easy way for you - you will have to manually synch each and every subtitle manually. I would suggest to use VisualSubSync for this purpose.

[Leecri]

Hi! Thanks for the reply,

I actually have tried that before, but maybe it's a problem because when I open the file in subtitle workshop, it's only the first video file of the DVD meaning it only plays like 14 minutes. So if I adjusted the first and last spoken subs to that video file would that be applied to only those 14 minutes?

So is there nothing wrong with the frames? and I still don't get why the duration of the whole first DVD file shows up as 14 minutes in video players and 00:32:41,615 in subtitle workshop, and it is toggled to time not frames. I also noticed around halfway of the subtitles, the timing is back to 0 and starts again.
All the subtitles that I can find are in two parts, so I joined them together, but shouldn't the timings all be in order then? I think that the subtitles were just literally joined, and the timings were not corrected.
Can anybody share any light on this?

[AlanHK]

Combine the VOBs into a single MPEG (eg with VOB2MPG or any MPEG editor).
Use that as the "movie" in Subtitle Workshop.

If your subs are divided into "CD"s you can use Subtitle Workshop's "join" function.
If you just pasted them togetther, it'll go back to zero in the middle, and they'll be useless.
If you were trying to link each sub file with a VOB, that was probably scrambling the times too.

Press "control B" to get the adjust timings dialog, set the time for first and last sub and generally that works. Otherwise you can mark intermediate points as well and it will interpolate.

It's necessary to read the help file to make sense out of all the functions, they're not really obvious in the GUI.

But how were you going to insert your subs if you've already authored it to VOBs?

It's much easier to reauthor from MPEG than VOB, in my opinion.

[Leecri]

Thanks for your help guys,
didn't help much but I did figure it out in the end, I opened the video in windows media player or VLC player and just marked the first spoken line and last and just adjusted there.

Subtitle workshop really confused me with the times, and if the timings were right it could've saved me days of frustration.

Anyway, thanks alot for all your help