Hard Coded Subtitles - Remove / Hide?

[jlrm365]

The feature on a DVD I have contains hard-coded subtitles. It is a letter-boxed video and the subtitles appear within the black letter-boxed areas. The subtitles are not optional, of course, being burned into the video.

Is there any way that I can cover the black areas, with some black of my own? The film is in English, but the subtitles are foreign and not needed. It's a documentary project that was passed to me.

The source is an XviD, as the friend is located abroad and wanted to make sure of being able to send it to me, and I made the DVD from it. Now that I see how obvious the subtitles are, I'd like them hidden.

Can this be done, with the DVD files? Is there a better way, pre or during conversion - from XviD to the DVD?

Thanks.

[manono]

Yes, it's easy. Assuming you're reencoding anyway, Letterbox(0,xx) where xx is the number of pixels you need to replace the lower black with fresh black, will completely cover them. The Letterbox command is, of course, an AviSynth command:

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Letterbox

It has to be reencoded. Changing a video like this always requires reencoding. It would be better that you start over with your AVI rather than doing it to the DVD. And if you have the AVI, a number of all-in-one conversion programs will allow you to edit the .avs to add in a line like that. You can also create a permanent opaque black subtitle background that covers the lower letterboxing, but that's a bit trickier to accomplish. That won't require reencoding the video. If you're interested, there's information about the process here:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1369916#post1369916

It involves taking the usually transparent subtitle background and making it opaque, as well as restricting it to the area you want. In your case, I think I'd make a single line blank subtitle for the entire movie, add it into the DVD, and then use DVDSubEdit to both make the background opaque and then use the vertical position slider to lower it so that it covers the area you want. But as I said, this is all a bit tricky.