www.makemkv.com

I am a very new user and rather inexperience in video extraction.

I have extracted the video from Opera Otello and I checked all subtitles except German and Spanish.

Not all players support the subtitles when playing back the ripped files.

In particular, Power Media player does not show any subtitles.
When playing the actual DVD one can set to see the Italian subtitles at the top of the video and the English subtitles at the bottom and they may be changed too.

The Windows media player shows only the English subtitles.

On the other hand the player MPC-HC (Nightly, 64-bit) allows change of subtitles but it does not allow dual subtitles from the DVD or the extracted file.

Is there a way to have dual subtitles in some player?

Also, there are various settings on software but I could not find their explanations. In particular, the on-line help seems to be dedicated to blue-ray discs but I only ?have normal DVDs.

Is there a relevant manual?

If you are working with DVD subtitles (also known as "VOB subtitles"), most software players SHOULD be able to play them.

Devices like Chromecast often do not support anything but text-based subtitles, while the subtitles used on both DVD and Bluray are "graphics", not text.

"Dual subtitles" is something I have only seen done with text-based subtitles, but they were part of a single subtitle track. Examples are song lyrics in both the original and translated language. The tools I use do not support them, so I cannot make any recommendations about that.

Woodstock wrote:If you are working with DVD subtitles (also known as "VOB subtitles"), most software players SHOULD be able to play them.

Devices like Chromecast often do not support anything but text-based subtitles, while the subtitles used on both DVD and Bluray are "graphics", not text.

"Dual subtitles" is something I have only seen done with text-based subtitles, but they were part of a single subtitle track. Examples are song lyrics in both the original and translated language. The tools I use do not support them, so I cannot make any recommendations about that.

Why Power Media player does not show any subtitles?
Why Windows Media player shows only the English subtitles?
Why MPC-HC (Nightly, 64-bit) allows changing the subtitles?


I thought ripped files should work as the original video discs.

What is the meaning of checking the various subtitles on the software only to find they are not properly supported.

I saw in the forum some discussion about "ripping" subtitle tracks and forced subtitles or default subtitles, but I do not see on the software. Is there some external software tool that may help me?

I also noticed that not all parts of the DVD are extracted. For example, the menus for auxiliary functions (audio, subtitles etc) are not on the play back files. Is this normal or I have a bug?

Well, let's look at the software you're working with. Microsoft lists the following for Power Media Player:

Supported Formats
• Videos/Movies: M4V, MP4V, MP4, MOV, 3G2, 3GP2, 3GP, 3GPP, AVI, ASF, WM, WMV, MKV, M2TS (with MPEG-2 and H.264), MPG, VOB, MPEG-4 Part 2, H.264, VC-1, WMV (7,8,9), MPEG-1, MPEG-2
• Audio: DTS, Ac3 (DD, DD+), AAC, MP3, PCM/WAV, M4A
• Image: JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIF
• Subtitles: SubRip (*.SRT), PowerDivX (*.PSB), MicroDVD (*.SUB), SunViewer (*.SUB), SubStation Alpha (*.SSA, *.ASS), and SAMI (*.SMI)

None of those subtitle types are VOB. So, while Power Media Player can do MKV files, it can't do subtitles unless you convert them to text, and convert them to one of the supported formats.

Windows Media Player:

If you're playing a Windows Media file or DVD that has captions or subtitles in a different language, you can change the language in which the captions or subtitles are displayed. For more information about changing the language in captions or subtitles, see Windows Media Player language settings: frequently asked questions.

From this, I'd say you have to select your language preference before you see the subtitle choices, but I have not tried using WMP in years.

MPC-HC specifically lists VOB subtitles as being supported, which is why it allows them to be selected.

The only mobile media player that I have tested that actually allows VOB subtitles is VLC, but I have limited experience with that. I know others exist, but I haven't bothered. Typically, I use Handbrake (from handbrake.fr) to recode the video to optimize operation on iOS and Android, and that includes burning the subtitles in.