Something I've always wanted to know...

[homerpez]

I have the DVD "This is Spinal Tap". I've just played it again tonight, but this time something cought my eye...

There's periodic text overlay, listing the names of characters in the movie the first time you see them (it's supposed to be a "Rockumentary", so this rounds out the format), but instead of being "in" the movie (encoded into graphics), it appears that it's a forced subtitle! That is, if I pause the movie, then do steps across where the text frames should appear, they aren't there!

Now here's what I always wanted to know. How would one encode a movie to VCD or SVCD with this forced subtitle? Does it come on automatically? You obviously can't enable subtitles, otherwise it will appear through the whole movie, or in another language!

So how do you get it to work?...

(no pressure, since I have no intention of encoding it to SVCD tonight or anything...)

[Vejita-sama]

Well if it's a subtitle there has to be a track for it. So enabling subtitles is ok, just choose the right track. This is similar to traffic. Since the first part of the movie is in spanish, whenever the characters they're subtitles. Rather then encode the subs as graphics/part of the movie they're a subtrack that loads automatically (for some strange reason it reads as french).

I would rip with smartripper and then read the info.txt file to see what each subtrack contains.

[homerpez]

So what you're saying then is it may have a non-addressable subtitle track? This particular DVD has subtitles, but I believe only in Spanish of French (I guess they assume no deaf people would be interested in a comedy on a rock band)...

And I also assume that Flask is my only option to encode then? Since it's the only program out that can do subtitle overlay (encoded into the video)?

[AntnyMD]

Slightly off-topic, but it was mentioned.

Nearly 100% of my friends who are deaf loathe DVD subtitles ... they're often not clear enough to be read, especially if the deaf person has a hearing-related vision problem. Why aren't DVDs also encoded with closed captioning? Some packages even have the CC (for closed captioning) logo, but are in fact not closed captioned at all!

[Vejita-sama]

There are a lot of ways to add subtitles beside Flask. Since you said that the subs are NOT graphics they must be a sub track. Not all subtitle tracks are listed (eg. Trafffic again). If you rip the whole DVD with smartripper you'll get an info.txt file that will list all the audio and subtitle tracks.

Due to the DVD standard you can't 'name your tracks' I think that's why the subs in Traffic read as french (they had to call them something). So you might want to check each subtrack to see what's in it.