Subtitles in MKV files out of sinc

[ikarishinji41]

Hi. I have some mkv files from an anime. The video is h264 and the subtitles are .ass. If I encode them directly onto the video file to burn on the DVD (using TMPGEnc Xpress, in my case), they work fine. However, if I extract them first (whether with MKV Cleaver or MKV Extract GUI), they get all out of sinc. What seems to be happening is that, since the person who encoded the MKV file did not generate subtitles for the opening and ending songs, just hardcoded them directly on the video file, the subtitles, once extracted, seem to skip the time periods corresponding to those opening and ending songs. For instance, the next episode preview subtitles should start at about 24 minutes, but they start at 21 minutes because they ignore the ending song. Of course I could try and correct the subs manually on Subtitle Workshop, but that would mean A LOT of work. Does anyone have any idea as to how I can solve this (except by hardcoding them directly onto the video, I would like to have a dvd with selectable subtitles). Thanks for the attention, guys!

[MilesAhead]

In Subtitle Workshop 4 under Edit menu Timings - Adjust - Adjust Subtitles you can enter the time of the first and the last sub. It's very quick. You can just run a player that gives precise time output or if that's not possible, get the minutes and seconds and use trial and error for the milliseconds settings. After 3 or 4 tries you should get it close enough that the lips should be in sync with the audio. It's very fast.

Just make a copy of the .ass file to work on so that you always have the original if some weird error happens.

[ikarishinji41]

The problem is that this happens in the "middle" of the subtitle file. The first subtitle is in its proper place, but after the opening song and the ending song they get out of sinc. I solved the problem by accident in quite a strange way, actually: I am processing the MKV files on TMPGEnc 4.7, using Shark007 codecs for the H264 video file and extracting the audio via TMPGEnc also. For some unaccountable reason, it ignores the opening and ending song when encoding the video and audio into dvd-compliant format, so now they match the subs. Never saw anything like that before!
Thank you anyway.