Subtitles - beginners woes

[Joolz2020]

Gave up using DVD decrypter with subtitled movies - no subtitle file created! Have tried using DVD Fab 8, and get a subtitle file, but although my WD media player shows the subtitles, they don't sync with the audio! There seem to be options (not described in the player manual) to speed up or slow down the subtitles, but with lots of tinkering I still can't get it right. It should be easier than this!

The movies I'm ripping are in English but have occasional foreign language sections, eg The Mummy TDE, Star Wars I. In a movie on TV you'd expect only these parts to be subtitled but in The Mummy TDE it's all or nothing and SWI seems the same. While in the case of the Mummy I remember having the same issue playing the DVD direct, I'm pretty sure that SWI had subtitles by default only when "Starwarsese" was being spoken. Despite asking DVD Fab 8 to rip all English subtitles (4 options, I think), I only get 1 subtitle when playing on the WD player. Maybe that's because DVD Fab crashed on completion of the conversion.

Sorry, I know there's a few variables here, but I am very frustrated! Seems all DVDs where I need subtitles are not worth trying to put on the WD player...

[filmboss80]

Whether by DVD Decrypter or DVDFab, a straight rip of a movie leaves everything intact, except for region coding and copy protection. No conversion is involved in ripping. You're doing something else. When you say you're doing "lots of tinkering," what do you mean?

[Joolz2020]

My tinkering is just messing with the WDTV control, which seems to speed up or slow down the subtitles to manually align with the audio. Are you saying that the subtitle should be within the VOB file if I've selected it in DVD decrypter? If so, there's a problem as the WDTV doesn't see it.

I've found since posting that an ISO file contains the subtitles and they are aligned without manual tinkering, but the file size is bigger than the VOB on its own (by 1Gb) so not an ideal solution.

[redwudz]

You could run the ripped video through DVD Shrink and get rid of some extras, subs, and languages you don't need, then output as a ISO. That should reduce the size somewhat. No idea why a direct conversion of the ripped video to ISO would add 1GB to the size.

[Joolz2020]

I've figured out how to pick only what I want in DVD shrink (using re-author) but I can't see how to output to ISO. All I can do is put it to a new disk or a hard disk folder (which I've done). The total size is now right but I'm not sure where the subtitles are and how I turn the lot into a single ISO file.

[redwudz]

Subs are within the VOBs with a DVD. After the video is analyzed, a selection screen should pop up and you choose 'ISO Image File' there, then select the destination. I also disable 'Burn with Nero', but I think the ISO selection is still there either way.

[Joolz2020]

Thanks for that - right under my nose! I'd disabled the burn with Nero option anyway as I have no intention of doing that.

I'm sorted now - either using DVD Shrink to rip direct from DVD what I want into an ISO file, or using DVD decrypter to rip entire disk to ISO to check on my WDTV player if I need to work out which subtitle (or audio track) is the right one, then re-authoring the ISO into a smaller one.

Thanks again.