simultaneous display of 2 subpicture streams?

[Radish]

You know how a DVD (particularly anime) might have subpicture translations of onscreen foreign text that can be displayed at the same time as, and frequently in a different color and probably with completely different timing from, subtitles for spoken dialog? Well, I'm pretty sure I've seen it before; at least something very much like it. And the DVD I'm trying to make (non-coincidently, anime) has onscreen foreign text and spoken foreign dialog at the same time, and would benefit greatly from this functionality.

The DVDSubEdit User Manual says "you cannot display a subpicture past the start time of the next subpicture (in the same stream)." Assuming this isn't just a limitation of DVDSubEdit (which would be grievously silly), I am lead to believe that to get the desired results I must separate the onscreen text captions from the rest of the subtitles (hey, I know how to do that), put them in their own subpicture stream (that, too, more or less), and then somehow set-up/configure my DVD and its subpic streams to display both streams at once (...I have no idea).

If this is indeed the case (and gosh, I don't see how it couldn't be), how would I do this? Other than using some fancy authoring suite that may or may not automate the exact process for me; this project is married to DVDAuthorGUI (in the form of menus, logic, etc. that I don't want to redo), and it doesn't feel like doing it manually will be hard enough to warrant divorce.

Assuming it's possible at all, anyway.

[minidv2dvd]

the only way i know of to get 2 printed subs on the screen of a dvd movie at the same time would be to burn one of them into the movie permanently. as in hard subs, and the other would be a selectable sub.

[guns1inger]

You cannot display two subpicture streams simultaneously, however it is possible to have it appear that way by having subtitles appear at the top and bottom of the screen. I have some Japanese movies that have the dialogue at the bottom of the screen, and occasional definitions of particular words at the top in a different type face and colour. The discs I refer to are the Lone Wolf and Cub series, released over here under the Eastern Eye label.

I have not yet seen an authoring tool that supports creating this type of subpicture stream, but obviously it can be done.

[borax]

Yes it can be done. But it is not the process to simultaneously show two subpicture streams, but create one subpicture stream which includes both subpictures. This process has some limits, but usually it is not that bad. The exact process depends on the type of subpicture data you already have (text based or image based) and of cause on the authoring application (the output from the 'subtitle joiner' needs to be supported by the authoring app). The usual setup is to have three selectable subtitle streams, one with language1 a second with language2 and a third with both languages (then one language as subtitles and the second as 'toptitles'). Concerning text based subtitles, the ssa format supports such 'overlapping' subpictures and can be used with MaestroSBT. If you have two different text based subpicture files, I would convert them to sup files separately. If you want different colors for the different languages avoid any antialiasing options (or use the same color for antialiasing and text). You only have 3 colors at all for the joined subpicture stream. If you already have your subtitles as sup files, this step is not necessary. If you have the subpictures in another image based format, convert them to sup first.
Load both sup files in SupViewer and create the joined sup file. The resulting sup file(s) may be used with any authoring application that supports sup files. Have a look into the SupViewer docu:
http://download.videohelp.com/gfd/SupViewer.html