Subtitle is transparent but outlined ?

[Krypto]

Hi Everyone

I have been putting all my DVDs through the program MakeMKV to store the movies on my NAS to play on my WDTV Live. In most cases it works perfectly but in other cases the subtitles are only outlined the subtitle itself is not there and you can see the movie instead. Playing these mkv where the subtitles are not shown correctly on the wd, on the pc instead, they work like a charm.

Putting the same movies through MakeMKV again didnt correct this but making an ISO of the movie via DVDDecryptor and playing the iso on the WDTV Live shows the subtitles correctly.
I have tried and put the ripped iso which is working correctly through makeMkv and see if that would make a difference, but sadly it didnt.

Have any one experienced this? or maybe have a way for me to troubleshoot the issue? Are there different types of subtitles on standard dvds? I thought it was just bmps and they where all made the same way. For further information it happens mostly on older dvds not so much on newer movies.

I am using version 1.5.3 Beta

[MilesAhead]

I don't have Live but I have the WD HDTV player for USB. afa subtitle files the only type I know for sure will work is an external .srt file. If you are talking English subs you can get .srt out of DVD without too much effort. Use DVDSubEdit as shown in this guide:

http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/2097 ... -subtitles


In my experience English subs from DVD using the Automatic OCR with this program and saved to .srt nearly always come out with very few errors. Manual OCR or edit of the .srt file isn't usually required. It's fast. It should only take a few minutes to use DVDSubEdit. The time consuming part would be getting the VIDEO_TS folder onto your HD. Or you may be able to just read directly from your optical drive.

Just name the .srt with the same basename as the movie and put it in the same folder:
movie.mkv
movie.srt

The WD player should notice the .srt file and display it automatically.

[Krypto]

Thank you for your reply but is this really the only way to get around this problem?

[MilesAhead]

If you just pulled the DVD directly into .mkv then I suppose the subtitles should be in DVD .sup format. If that's true then you could extract the subtitle track using MkvExtractGui-2 or the command line mkvextract from mkvtoonix download.

Then just do the same bit with loading the .sup into DVDSubEdit etc..
(After it loads the .sup file the FileOpen dialog will pop open again in case
you also have the corresponding .ifo file for the subs. You won't, so just
click Cancel for that dialog.)

Any other way and you'll end up doing manual OCR. I hate that more than anything.

The alternative is to search subtitle download sites for the movie subtitle in .srt format already.
Check the end time of the subtitle. If it's just a bit less than the run time of the movie you
may have gotten lucky. Trouble is there are often many releases with different run-times.
If you're not sure play a bit and see if the subs match up with the dialog as best you
can tell.

With conventional DVD subs you can usually produce a pretty good .srt yourself. With
PGS subs it's more problematic.

[klogd]

I had the same problem, just outline no white fill in the subtitles on my WD box. This is the reply I got from Western Digital:

Thank you for your reply.

Please try using a different subtitle file for your MKV files. Compatible subtitle formats are SRT, ASS, SSA, SUB, SMI.

Which format does makeMKV use? Is it possible to get it to support other formats?

[MilesAhead]

I had the same problem, just outline no white fill in the subtitles on my WD box. This is the reply I got from Western Digital:

Thank you for your reply.

Please try using a different subtitle file for your MKV files. Compatible subtitle formats are SRT, ASS, SSA, SUB, SMI.

Which format does makeMKV use? Is it possible to get it to support other formats?

MakeMKV would take out whatever stream that's available you select. Afaik it just muxes the stream into the .mkv.

Also when WD says it supports .sub they are only talking text .sub format. I only have the WD gen1 player but I did the firmware upgrade with supposed additional subtitle support, and graphical idx/sub type subtitles never showed on it.
Nor will it do .divx with subs muxed in as done by AviAddXSubs as my stand-alone DVD player will. The only format I've verified to work is .srt.. although the other text based types may work. .srt it pretty much guaranteed to work everywhere so might as well stick with that. I also try to avoid even muxed in .srt or utf8 since it seems less prone to getting out of sync with the external .srt file.

As I say for conventional DVD subs you can usually work English .sup into .srt easily. If you have one of those softwares that decrypts the disc in the optical drive it may be faster just to use DVDSubEdit to extract the subs right from the VIDEO_TS folder on the DVD.