up vote 2 down vote favorite
1
share [g+] share [fb]

I'm helping out a small educational group here in Denmark with translating English DVD course material into Danish, simply by adding danish subtitles to the movie. However, I'm having a hard time merging the files back together to something useful on a European DVD player. Being very low budget, I'm helping them out for free, and I don't have licenses for any professional tools, and I've gotten this far with free tools.

My steps so far has been (it's been a while so I hope I'm remembering correctly here):

  1. Extract the DVD to ISO files.
  2. Extract the ISO into minor parts using SmartRipper.
  3. Extract the srt files by using SubRip OCR.
  4. Translated the english subtitles into danish subtitles
  5. Got it working in VLC

The problem with 5. is, however, that the video and subtitles often get out of sync when fast forwarding, and it's low-tech users that are using the end result.

So unless they're missing something important, VLC is not a good enough solution, as the subtitles will of course have to be in sync. Especially for those who do not understand English at all, because they might not even notice that something is wrong, and learn something wrong when combining the video with the Danish subtitles (I know that is worst case, and probably not that big an issue, but having it go out of sync is the reason why I'm trying to find af solution that does not use VLC).

I've got various steps to put pieces back together from, and anything that'll get me to the correct result is ok by me. :)

How can I merge together .srt files and danish texts into a functioning DVD (preferably using free software)?

link|improve this question
So you want to hard code the subtitles into the video file? Basically, the video now permanently has the subtitles on? – Rob Nov 15 '11 at 19:24
Anything that works really. Since it is a special version to those who are not so strong in the english language, there is no problem with it being hardcoded. – Johny Skovdal Nov 16 '11 at 11:08
I can't edit my own comments yet, just wanted to add a @Rob tag. – Johny Skovdal Nov 16 '11 at 20:50
@Rob, do you have a way to solve this? I've yet to find a solution. – Johny Skovdal Nov 25 '11 at 17:31
I've never done this, but I've used virtualdub to combine multiple AVI files. my-guides.net/en/guides/general-video/… – Rob Nov 26 '11 at 1:55
show 1 more comment
feedback

1 Answer

up vote 0 down vote

VLC has a pretty awesome feature for this purpose.

What you do is

  1. For getting the video file a.k.a. Ripping from disk

    Go to the Media menu and choose Convert/Save. Then pick the Disc tab and adjust the Starting Position to the proper Title/Chapter. (You can find the proper Title/Chapter by viewing the disc with Media/Open Disc first.) Click Convert/Save.

  2. Getting the subtitle with video file embedded.

    It has a feature for selecting the subtitle track as shown in the picture.

enter image description here

You can configure the output format from the tons of options available in the next dialog after you select convert/save.

link|improve this answer
Hi @Vineet, thanks for the clear explanation of how to use VLC, I am already doing this however, I'll update my question to make that clearer. The problem with this approach is, that the users are complaining that subtitles easily gets out of sync when fast forwarding, so it's not a good enough solution at the moment. – Johny Skovdal Nov 16 '11 at 15:17
Am I missing something with VLC when users complain about out of sync cubtitles, or is it a known bug? – Johny Skovdal Nov 25 '11 at 17:32
i'll check it!! – Vineet Menon Nov 25 '11 at 18:49
Did you find anything? :) – Johny Skovdal May 7 at 8:58
i cannot find any bug in trac.videolan.org resembling your problem... probably you should submit a ticket...it seems to be an encoder problem.. – Vineet Menon May 7 at 11:14
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.