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Custom Subtitles for DVD Playback?

Posted: 20 Mar 2009 07:24
by Joren
Hi, I am a new user of VLC and I am trying to guage its usefulness as a DVD player. I have installed the most recent version 0.9.8a on a Windows Vista (...bleck...) Dell laptop, and I would like to be able to use this laptop to play back DVDs.

Currently, I reside in Japan and I would like to be able to watch DVDs to study Japanese. However, sometimes the English subs provided with the DVD are either bad or nonexistent, and in such cases I would like to be able to use a custom subtitle when I watch the DVD, yet with VLC I have not been able to find a way to do this.

VLC DOES have a "Use a subtitles file" option when you go to File -> Open, but what if you go to File -> Open Disc? There is no such option on that tab. Is there no way to use a custom subtitles file with a DVD? I did notice a post suggesting dragging the subtitle file onto the movie while it's playing, but this doesn't seem to work very well for me and sometimes I get errors. Is there another way I'm missing?

Just to clarify - Ripping movies to hard disk and manually subbing them are not options for me. This computer doesn't have much of a scratch disk and even if it did I don't want to have to wait for hours messing around with stuff when I happen to want to watch a movie :) However I'm not above some command-line jujitsu or patching, so if VLC has such a solution please let me know, and apologies in advance if my cursory forum search happened to miss the solution in question. Thanks!

P.S. - I first posted this in the Windows forum but then I realized that this probably isn't Windows-specific, so I deleted that post and moved it here. Sorry!

-- Joren

Re: Custom Subtitles for DVD Playback?

Posted: 20 Mar 2009 11:51
by Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Drag n drop the subtitle on the video.

Re: Custom Subtitles for DVD Playback?

Posted: 20 Mar 2009 16:10
by Joren
Thanks for your advice; as I said, I've tried the drag and drop thing and it doesn't seem to work very well for me and sometimes gives me errors. Is there any way to do this when opening a disc, like there is for opening a file?

-- Joren

Re: Custom Subtitles for DVD Playback?

Posted: 22 Mar 2009 00:06
by Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Thanks for your advice; as I said, I've tried the drag and drop thing and it doesn't seem to work very well for me and sometimes gives me errors. Is there any way to do this when opening a disc, like there is for opening a file?

-- Joren
Yes, with command line. But, DVD with NO menus in the GUI and drag and drop the subtitles should do exactly the same.