Subs play in MPC but not on disc

[pzoggy7]

I have an.avi file with .srt subs which plays fine on the computer in Media Player Classic, but if I put the files on to disc (in the same folder, with same titles) and try to play it on my standalone Dvd player, the subs are missing.
If I try to convert the files to DVD format with Avi2Dvd the programme crashes towards the end. If I try with WinAVI the programme won't accept the .srt file (error - application data).
The files play ok in Subtitle Workshop but if I click on 'Information and errors' it lists 15 OCR errors, which if I ask it to fix and then save the file, still doesn't work on disc (at least in WinAVI).
I tried to hardsub the .avi using VirtualDubMod, but the subs didn't show.
Any ideas what else I could try?

[redwudz]

You might try FAVC to convert to a DVD. If it also fails, then there is likely something wrong with your files.

[jman98]

There are a lot of reasons why the subs might not play. I'm not going to deal with AVI->DVD conversion issues but try to give you some suggestions for dealing with the subtitles issue so you can watch the Divx file on your standalone DVD player without having to convert the file to DVD.

First of all copy the .srt file to your PC's hard disk. Open it with something like Word or Wordpad, scroll to the end of the file WITHOUT MAKING ANY CHANGES and then save it. One possible problem is that if someone edited the srt file in Linux, the end of line markers won't be the same as if it was edited on a PC. I have seen my Philips DVD player refuse to touch a subtitles file that I edited on a Linux system and I had to open it in Wordpad and save it on the PC to get the end of line characters in the standard CR-LF Windows format. Then my DVD player played the subs.

Second you should make sure that the subtitles file has the same name exactly as your AVI file. This is really stupid and Philips has no such limitation with their DVD players, but some DVD players insist that the srt file and the avi file have the exact same name except for the .avi or .srt extension or the player simply will NOT play the subtitles.

You don't say what your DVD player is. Do you know that it can play srt files? Have you ever done this before? If not, check and be sure it supports the format and then be sure to do whatever is normally done to play subs with avi files. On my Philips player I have to go through some non-intuitive steps to get it to play subtitle files.

Finally, check your subs (maybe you should do this before saving the file in step one, but I forgot about it until now) for weird characters that shouldn't be there like ^B or something strange like that and remove them. Weird characters can cause DVD players to barf on subtitle playback. Any control characters (start with ^) that you see in the file should be removed for sure.

[pzoggy7]

Thanks jman98 for your suggestion, tried it but it didn't work for me.
However, I have resolved my problem by managing to hardsub the .avi file following Baldrick's sticky using Virtualdubmod (correctly this time). Virtualdubmod accepted the .srt file OK.
The hardsubed .avi plays better on my DVD player (Eltax DV-251) than other files with .srt subtitles.