No Captions

[Buff]

Wondered if someone can help?

I am in the process of backing up my DVD's to my hard drive using DVD Fab.

I use the DVD to DVD option and all works fine, except that when I play movies that have certain parts that have captions due to foreign speaking parts e.g. Godfather Part II, Kill Bill etc... the captions don't show.

Strangely, some films are fine - The Da Vinci Code, True Lies

Any idea why this is happening and how I can make the captions show. Obviously, I don't want the subtitles to show all the time, hence I've used the word captions, to try and differentiate between the two.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Complication]

These are called forced subtitles. What DVDFab version are you using? Unfortunately there has been a few complaints recently about forced subtitles not being setup properly after a DVDFab rip.

You said you using DVD to DVD, but what type of output? Full Movie? Main Movie? As a folder? As an ISO? Are you doing any steps after DVDFab?

Also, what are you using for playback?

[Buff]

Forced subtitles - makes sense.

Thanks for your reply - I'm using DVD to DVD (although the target is my hard drive, rather than another DVD) Full Disc. I am using DVD Shrink to reduce the size of the files and to keep just the main movie, but I've recently re-ripped Kill Bill to see if the forced subtitles are showing and they're not.

I mainly use Windows Media Player to view them, but the result is the same in VLC

And I'm using DVD Fab 6.2.0.5

Thanks for your help

[Complication]

I'm not sure why DVDFab is removing the forced subtitle option. However, if you use Main Movie mode in DVDFab then you can click on the left most column to get a little arrow that marks the forced subtitle to use (similar to the arrow in the audio section).

I assume you are using Shrink because you only have the free version of DVDFab. You can also correct the issue in the Shrink step by right-clicking on the title in the DVD structure and updating the default streams. A lot goes into DVDFab to keep it current and provide this forum so if you use it regularly, I would encourage you to say thank you and purchase it.

[Buff]

I've got the full version of DVDFab, but use DVD Shrink to reduce the size further - I was under the impression that DVDFab only reduces the size so much and you can't change the size below 4gb?

I'm looking at the Main Movie page, but can't see where the arrow is for forced subtitles. I can see the arrows in the audio section on the right and the subpicture section below it, but no forced subtitles section?

Cheers

[Complication]

Seems odd to want to compress down to less than 4G and still use MPEG2 as output, but to each their own.

In the subpicture section click on the empty column to the left of the subtitle track that should be forced. An arrow will appear similar to the one in the audio section.

[signals]

Hi Buff
There are several ways that subtitles for translations are handled in DVDs and I think you are seeing the results of that. DaVinci code, for example uses what are called Forced subs, which means they play regardless of any settings on your player or any settings you make in the menu of the DVD. The ones in DaVinci Code are contained in the same subpicture stream as the regular dialog, but this is not always the case: they can be in a stream by themselves. Some discs have a stream for the translations that is not Forced, but is played by the DVD menu system as the "default" subtitle (Apocalypto is an example). For these to work correctly in your backup, you must either include the menus or select the subpicture stream that contains them as the default using the DVDFab default arrow. You can read about this in the Tutorial on the Main Movie or Customize pages. Use the Preview window in DVDFab to look at the different subpicture streams to see which one has the subtitles you want to include.

Wondered if someone can help?

I am in the process of backing up my DVD's to my hard drive using DVD Fab.

I use the DVD to DVD option and all works fine, except that when I play movies that have certain parts that have captions due to foreign speaking parts e.g. Godfather Part II, Kill Bill etc... the captions don't show.

Strangely, some films are fine - The Da Vinci Code, True Lies

Any idea why this is happening and how I can make the captions show. Obviously, I don't want the subtitles to show all the time, hence I've used the word captions, to try and differentiate between the two.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Buff]

Interesting you say that, Complication, cos I'm at a loss to which format to backup to; I tried WMV, because I would have liked all the movies to show on WMP, but the conversion took so long and the results weren't fantastic - speech not in sync with movie!

DivX had the same result as WMV and I couldn't change the metadata.

I've tried ISO but couldn't get Daemon Tools to work with Windows 7 too well - they played in VLC fine, but I would like to see the movies in Windows Media Centre if not WMP.

So I came back to vob files - they don't show up in WMP, although they do play, but they do show up in WMC. The quality seems fine, but are you saying that by reducing the size to circa 2gb per movie I'm going to affect the quality too much?

Just re-ripped Kill Bill and all is good, many thanks (and to Signals for your post). There were 3 subpicture streams, one showed subtitles the whole time, one showed nothing and the last just shows the subtitles to the foreign speaking parts - perfect. Turns out this was already there on the Full Disc rip, I just hadn't realised they were different.

Many thanks for your help, if you have any comments on the format choice, I'd be interested in hearing them?

Thanks again

[Complication]

I have now been schooled by the master of subtitles, signals.

As for the format, I don't know much about what would play well in a Windows world. However, MPEG4 (H264 or XVID) has the capability of a lot less compression errors than MPEG2 at the same size (or similar errors at a smaller size). One to the key things you need to do is to use the more advanced compression options when trying to maintain quality. Unfortunately, the default DVDFab Mobile profiles do not have these settings (they all use Basic rather than Main or High). Sorry, I haven't had the time to post modified profiles for high quality in the new forum.

[GregiBoy]

I'd say the 4Gb requirement is because the OP is using a FAT32 formatted drive?

[Buff]

If OP is original poster, then that's me and no; my drives are all NTFS

DVDFab seems to reduce the size to typically 4.3gb to fit onto a DVD5, in options you can change the output size to anything from 4gb to 4.92gb but not any lower