Phillips DVP 5982 Subtitles do not work

[shawnh]

I just picked up the DVP 5982 and from what I've seen it is pretty sleek. However, I can not get the subtitles to show with my Xvid (.avi) files. I am pretty new to this stuff, but I thought all I have to do was have the avi file and the srt file with the same name and in the same folder and it should pick it up. I also tried it with sub files by converting the srt to sub and it also did not work. Has anybody else tried subtitles with the DVP 5982? I've heard it works with 5960 fine, maybe a firmware upgrade is needed, if so where can I get it? Thanks

[handyguy]

Your file names are too long I bet. Make them nice short & no pretty characters.

Btw, I believe that dvd resume (not divx), is done by pushing play when it says 'loading' on screen. Then it should say dvd resume on the screen. Just a note.

[newuser01]

I'm just trolling thru this forum and saw your question.

I just also acquired the said player from Cost-co. The subs shows up fine for me. When playing the file, press sub button on the remote and it turns on/off the sub titles. It may be obvious to others but it took a while for me to figure this out.

So may me you can try that.

Regards.

[jman98]

I can give you some general advice for Divx/Xvid and subs on Philips DVD players. Generally, the names don't have to be the same. You can have on the same disc 2 files like this:
myvideo.avi
scummysubs.srt
and it will work fine. However, there are some things to be wary about. Don't use SUB format at all. It never really works. There are multiple formats with this extension and the only SUB format that might work on these players is NOT SubRip format, which is what SUB almost always means. There is one SUB format that is text based and this MIGHT work.

SRT does work, but you can have issues if you edited the file on a Unix computer because Windows and Unix have different end of line characters. I've seen this happen on my Philips DVP-642 with SRT files. If you think this might be the case, open the file under Windows with some editor like WordPad and save it as a text file and it should be OK. Also, if there are certain weird non-text characters in the file, it can cause the DVD player to vomit on the subtitles file and refuse to play it.

Be aware too that you have to select the subtitles file BEFORE you attempt to play the AVI file. This is critical and very non-intuitive. Many people don't know this and it is key to making it work. You should see a message on the TV screen after selecting the subtitles file that says that you selected a subtitles file. Only then can you select the AVI file and play it. You may sometimes also have to push the Subtitles button on your remote after the AVI film starts and cycle through the options (stop on one of the Latin character set options) to get the subtitles to play. I've seen this happen too.

handyguy's advice is true for some DVD players, but for Philips the length of the name is not generally an issue. At least I've never seen it be, but I suppose if you do something crazy like have some file with a name of 30+ characters that might be an issue. I can definitely tell you that the names do not have to be the same for the AVI and subtitles file.