Trouble importing chapters and subtitles in Maestro

[SupaCoopa]

Hello everone. I've just started using DVD Maestro, after reading four or five different guides and tutorials. I came across trouble at my first go...

Chapters
I have extracted chapter list from the original IFO using ChapterXtractor 0962. I tried using the DVDMaestro preset at first, and Maestro responded with a parsing error while importing the chp file. I then set the format to %hh:%mm:%ss%cc and Maestro could import the chapter list but only to mess up with it. While I had 47 chapters I only got 22 and they were not exactly were they should be. I then only choose to extract/import 22 points, this time only 11 were taken and they were wrong too. Both times all chapters were moved at the first half of the movie. What is going wrong here?

Subtitles
A similar trouble this one. Subs in two languages were ripped using Subrip 115 as BMP and a Maestro son file was saved. The English subs were more in number, as they were starting earlier in the movie than the Greek ones. I imported both son files and everything went wrong! The two subtitles were previewed as to start at the same time, and the text was not what it should be. In other words, random subs are now appearing with random timing, totally irrelevant to that of the movie. What is going on here?

I compiled the project and the movie was playing fine, sound perfectly in sync and the chapters (wrong as they were) working fine. The subs were totally out of time and space for both languages, words that belong to the last scene showing at the beginning where no-one was speaking etc. There isn't a fps conflict, as I have made sure 25fps were defined all the way through various programs, since the movie is PAL. I suppose it's some generic trouble with Maestro not being able to correctly interpret the time markings in both chapter and subtitle lists? What am I supposed to do now? DVD Maestro vesion/build is 2912Final

Any tip/info/help greatly appreciated. Cheers to all.

[dwisniski]

Could have something to do with how you ripped the movie. When I rip a movie using Smartripper, if I rip the movie and audio streams using stream processing to seperate files, I have problems later with the chapters and subtitles, it has something to do with the VOB files being modified. If I rip the entire DVD and use DVD2AVI to get the extract the audio files and frameserve to CCE, Maestro has no problems with chapters or subtitles. Check how you backup your movies, probably something in there.

[SupaCoopa]

Thanks for your answer dwisniski, you may well be right. However the text files (*.chp and *.son) are stating the correct times regarding chapters and subtitle timing....

I have ripped the movie using SmartRipper's Files option (so as to have the ability to capture menu screens etc at my convenience) and then re-ripped from HD to an other folder using SmartRipper's stream proccessing to get separate m2v and ac3 files. Subs were re-ripped as direct stream copy and then I used SubRip on those re-ripped VOBs.

I'll try to see if extracting subs from the first-time (Files option) ripped VOBs will work. I can manually add chapters for sure, but I really need the subtitles, I hope this works.

Cheers

[Faustus]

This happens alot with DVDdecrypter also, if you do not reencode often the chapters will not import correctly, so far I just enter them manually when this happens.

[MrSnake]

The timecode of your movie file doesn't start at 0.

In the movie editor you can see "wall clock", when you import the video stream you can see 00:59:59:59

Click on it and reset it to zero.
After that you can import all subtitles.

Let me know if it works for the chapters, as it didn't for me.

MrSnake

[SupaCoopa]

MrSnake, thanks for your valuable tip!

It worked as charm for the subtitles, but not for the chapters. Well, not a big deal of work to manually set a dozen chapter points anyway.

I noticed, however, that after saving, closing and re-openning the project, the timeline was again set to 00:59:59:59. This didn't seem to cause any trouble though, I compiled the project afterwards and everything was OK. Is this some kind of Maestro bug?