The Phantom Forced Subtitles

I finally got around to re-doing my Star Wars 1: The Phantom Menace DVD this weekend. I had to fix the forced subtitles. And unfortunately, I discovered that for some reason SubRip was unable to read the subtitles off the 'forced' track that is on the DVD.

As I've noted in earlier posts, on the Star Wars DVDs, the forced subtitles tend to be on the second 'English' subtitle track on the DVD.

I haven't had any problems with the other Star Wars DVD's, so I was rather annoyed that it wasn't working for The Phantom Menace. I never figured it out either.

I managed to find a copy of a good SRT for the forced subs, and I've put it on my blog for anyone else that is interested. 

So, with SRT in hand, I used RipBot264 as described in my 'Complicated' instructions and managed to get a good backup of the movie.

RipBot264 doesn't always like DVD angles

While re-doing Star Wars 2 - Attack of the Clones, RipBot264 kept erroring out on me when trying to run an index against the DVD itself or my initial file-based rip.

Turns out, it didn't have any problem after I used DVD Decrypter to strip away all the extra angles used in the initial text scrolling. I can only assume that sometimes, RipBot264 can't handle multiple angle streams very well.

Anyway, after decrypting and getting my subtitles, the backup worked beautifully. Notably, Episode 2 did not require any deinterlacing.

Star Wars VI and other details

So last night, I re-did my Star Wars 6 DVD backup as I was writing up my first example post. It occured to me that I could save other some hassle time by saving the SRT files that I create and make them available. This way, people could skip having to use SubRip if they wanted ot rip the same movie title I have in the same way.

So, I've made a new 'Recent SRT' where I'll put any SRT's I use from DVD's. SRT's are easily extracted from Blu-Rays, so I won't put those there unless there is something special I do with them.

Enjoy

Victory over Star Wars IV! ... mostly

I'm going to declare victory, although I'm still not as happy as I could be.

That said, I managed to backup a copy of Star Wars IV into a AVC-HD, with burned in 'forced' english subtitles.

The good news is that it plays right through my Windows Media Center and my Media Center extender (XBox 360). It even plays right through a program called Media Player Classic (highly reccomended player, btw). I get my 5.1 sounds, and everything is great! Since this is why I am burning my movies into my harddrive, this is more than good enough.

But...

The bad news is that when I play it through Windows Media Player, the sound is not there. It just plays this static/noise.  Its very odd, I've never had that result burning from RipBot264 before. The audio demuxed eventually to a AC3 at 440 htz, but compressing it or copying it resulted in the same problem. The only noticably different thing in the mix here is I used DVD Converter to get a copy without the superfluous other 'angles'. I'm going to chalk it up to a codec problem unless someone tells me otherwise.

On a related note, I've added another software tool into my kit. SubRip. It is good for getting the subtitles off DVD's.

Oh well, its still perfectly suitable for my uses, so I'm moving on. Finally! I'll post a complete set of instructions and what I did to achieve this on an 'Example' page.