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DVD Disc dual subtitles: how to display the second subtitle?


paolo866

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Dear developer

How to display the dual (secondary) subtitles on DVD Discs ?

In fact: subtitle > subtitle setting panel > always GREYED

I can display the main subtitle (e.g. ENGLISH) on the bottom of the screen.

But the, the secondary or dual subtitle? How to display it?

My DVD discs, I have verified, they contain have at least 3 subtitles in the disc: ENGLISH, FRENCH, CHINESE. I wish to dislplay the main subtitle (ENGLISH) at the bottom (I can do this) and the secondary subtitle (CHINESE) at the top of the screen.

Thank you a lot!

Paolo

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AFAIK only one subtitle stream can be displayed at a time.

MPCStar is an implementation of the freeware but closed-source Tiger Player, which was created by somebody else. There is no Mac version of it. You'd have to ask its creator about any plans for one.

Since the player itself is closed-source, there's a definite limit to what can be done with it.

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Dear Kluelos

I understand, but MPCStar was advertised in the download page as one of the few player capable to display dual subtitle and even giving you the possibility to choose the position of the subtitles on the screen...

Very strange right?

Thanks a lot

Paolo

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I don't use MPCStar myself, so I'm not as familiar with it as (hopefully) some others are.

Looking at the subtitle menu though, I'd conclude that you can do dual subtitles if they are separate files (.srt files, for example), but you can't do two subtitles encoded into the DVD. Your menu choices are:

  • Choose DVD subtitle
  • Choose Subtitle File (Top)
  • Choose Subtitle File (Bottom)

From this I gather that you can chose the first one, or you can choose the second and/or third. You can try other combinations but I assume you already have. I think it's pretty likely that most DVD drives can't read two subtitle tracks at once, but I don't know that.

Now you might be able to extract the subtitles from the DVD into files, and play them that way. You have nothing to lose by trying.

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Dear Kluelos

You are probably right, but as I am not a techie, I would love if someone can step in and guide me in this process: how to extract subtitles from my DVD (or even download from internet) and then make the video player run dual subtitles, the first one, on the bottom of the screen, already encoded in the DVD and the second one, extracted or downloaded, on the top of the screen, obviously in sync each other with the spoken words.

Thanks a lot!

Paolo

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From what I've seen with every major DVD software player I've tried (Powerd DVD, Win DVD and the likes of them) they always support displaying 2 subtitles track at one time.

I just didn't make much use of that feature ever.

I suppose that if the creators of MPC Star advertise it as capable of displaying 2 sub streams simultaneously it should be doing that without a fuss.

I can't try that though since I don't have any DVD disc with subtitles at hand.

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Dear GreyWizard.

yes PowerDVD does Dual Subtitles.

But I am running a Mac Air and PowerDVD is a Windows only software (I own version 11 ultra). So I run PowerDVD with Parallels Desktop 7 (A virtual Machine).

DVD are barely acceptable with a fps around 3 to 5 (Frames per seconds). MPC does a better job with fps around 15 (so there is fluidity in watching DVD Discs).

The best, of course, would be running a nativa Mac DVD player with dual subtitles. There are more than 50 available in the market, NONE of them (including VLC-MAC, Splayer, OPlayer, UMPlayer, Movist, XBMC, iPlayer) can play dual subtitles... I am so frustrated.

Any more suggestions? Any Mac DVD player can play dual subtitles ?

Thanks

Paolo

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Kluelos, I really doubt that any software player will be able to display a text subtitle file (e.g. SRT or SUB) over a video which is in DVD-Video format (i.e. MPEG2 program stream interleaved with audio and subtitle streams in .VOB container files and with video display programming instructions contained in .IFO files).

As you well know the DVD-Video structure and standards are quite rigid and all players, more or less try to comply with that. Since in the DVD-Video standard the subtitle streams are mostly in form of BMP captions (or equivalent raster formats) all software DVD disc players KNOW how to interpret and display that, but I'm not aware of any software DVD player that will allow input of an external text subtitle file (.txt, .srt, .sub) while playing a DVD-Video file set.

In order to transform a DVD subtitle track in a text file (e.g. SRT) you have to perform OCR on it to make it go from raster images to text font characters. Thus the subtitle interpreting "engines", in software players are different for DVD subtitle tracks than those used by players for text files displayed over MPEG4 video (e.g. DivX, XviD, etc.).

Just a thought, that it's worth checking first if whatever software player you're going to use ACCEPTS input of external subtitle text files, before going through the pain of converting a DVD subtitle stream into a text file.

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To me, subtitles are at best an annoyance, so I wouldn't know. I have simply never asked the question, and neither has anyone else I know of. Maybe all DVD players/drives can or could do this if anyone wanted them to.

But if all this means you have to rip a DVD to an .avi file and then rip a couple of .srt files, well, that's what it means. If you've got to have dual subtitles (and I assume SOMEbody must, else why bother adding the capability to MPCStar?) then it may involve extra work to get there.

We know what software player he's going to use, and we know that it does accept external subtitle files, so these aren't issues.

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What I meant was that he should check whether the player he's going to use (i.e. MPC Star, VLC, BS.Player or another MPEG4 player that also plays DVD-Video as well) is capable of accepting the use of an external subtitle file while playing DVD-Video files sets (be it from a disc, ISO image or VIDEO_TS folder on the HDD).

Of course, MPC Start accepts external files while playing other content type (e.g. MPEG4 encoded files) but DVD-Video is a special breed and I never checked if it does that when you play a DVD-Video disc. That's why I was mentioning the rigid structure and decoding rules above; I don't know if any software player has gone far enough from that standard while playing DVD-Video content, so as to allow the overlay of a subtitle from a text file.

I'd check that myself but I don't have any DVDs at hand right now.

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