VobSub subtitles: what's wrong?

[rduke15]

Hello,

From all I've read, it seemed VobSub subtitles should work flawlessly in recent versions of VLC, but I never got any subtitle to show up. What am I doing wrong?

• I use VLC 0.8.1 on Windows XP
• The subtitles were extracted with VobSub 2.23 which created a .sub and an .idx file.
• The video and audio were extracted from the DVD into one .vob file with DVD decrypter, and also into an .mpg file with TMPGenc.
• Both versions of the video play fine
• Media Player Classic shows the subtitles
• VLC seems to find the subtitles, but doesn't display them.

The messages window says:

spudec debug: SPU packets size=4698 should be 4698
spudec debug: valid subtitle, size: 720x573, position: 0,2
spudec debug: cropped to: 720x69, position: 0,418
spudec debug: using custom palette (border 3, inner 0, shade -1)
spudec debug: total size: 0x125a, RLE offsets: 0x2 0x9ab
main debug: decoded 108/108 pictures
etc.

In Video -> Subtitle track, I seem to have 2 English subtitles. Whichever I select, it makes no difference: no subtitles are ever shown.

Thanks for any help...

[Guest]

I wonder if this have any connection to my problems too? I have this .mpg (svcd/mpeg2) file, and external subtitles. And I can't get the subtitles to show, whatever I do. I tried different video outputs and running it via commandline options, but it just don't work. Avi's and subtitles work perfectly.

[naugas]

I'm the guest above. Might add that I only tried several text formats of subtitles, not bitmaps as the topic starter. (If .idx & .sub's, they are bitmaps, right?)

Using WinXP and VLC 0.8.1

[wazzzup]

Hi,

I'm also having problems with subtitles. I record from a DVB-S card and get an mpeg-2 and an srt-file. VLC shows the movie, but the subtitles are missing.

After much debugging, I have found the cause of the problem. VLC uses muxrate and byte position in the file to calculate current time. The muxrate used, is the one found in the PES pack header. This muxrate is often (always?) wrong. This causes VLC:s internal timing to go too slow and the subtitles are discarded in the rendering stage. The time shown in the status bar of VLC is also too slow.

To the developers:
There must be a better way to calculate the current time in an MPEG file! What about counting frames? Or even using a real time clock, since the subrip file contains time stamps?

[DJ]

I ran across this issue yesterday and previously did not have a problem with VOBSub Seems that the problem here has two possibilities.

1. The DVD I was trying to rip subs from reported 4 languages. Only CC and English subs were there. The DVD Menus only allowed the CC option.

2. Seems that if CC is pulled with the sub in VOBSub it won't play in VLC while it will play in MPC. MPlayer displayed the same action. Once CC is omitted everything works normally. CC can also be done separately in SRT fashion and seems to work OK.