How to get subtitles to format correctly from my DVD player?

October 22, 2006 11:41 PM

My friend gave me a home-burned DVD of DIVX content that comes with SRT subtitles. My DVD player plays the media fine, except it seems to display the subtitles too large -- they line-break in odd places and then the second line of text doesn't appear on screen at all. But if I watch the files on my computer in VLC, everything is fine.

I've checked all of the DVD player options and can't seem to find anything that would affect font/size or position of subtitles. Is there a program that would allow me to open the SRT files and re-save them with different font or line-break options, so I could re-burn them to DVD and watch them from my DVD player (in the living room)?

posted by xo to computers & internet (5 comments total)

.srt is a plain text format, with no size information - just start & stop timings and the subtitle text.

Your DVD may support other formats - you'd have to find out which ones (e.g. .ssa), see which (if any) of them either support text size (.ssa does) or are straight bitmaps, then use something like Subtitle Workshop to convert the .srt to that format.
posted by Pinback at 12:00 AM on October 23, 2006

What kind of DVD player is it?
posted by filmgeek at 4:40 AM on October 23, 2006

I've found this guide to adding permanent subtitles from videohelp.com provides a pretty straightforward and simple method. I've used it on a number of films successfully (the only problem you will have is if the srt is either A) not properly synced to your divx film or B) is improperly formatted.)

FWIW, if your player is a phillips dvp642, some firmwares supposedly had crappy srt rendering -- you might do a search on "firmware dvp642" and see if you can't find a way to fix it.
posted by fishfucker at 10:24 AM on October 23, 2006

Oh, I should mention that the one tricky thing with that method that gets glossed over is that you need to *recompress* the video (because you're rendering it, and then recompressing it with virtualdubmod).

In order to maintain the filesize, you need to make sure you're recompressing it at approx the same rate -- you often will need to go into the "file info" box and check the number of frames and frame rate, and then use the little calculator included in the DivX control panel in order to determine the proper sample rate. If you're having trouble, search around on videohelp.com for help.
posted by fishfucker at 10:29 AM on October 23, 2006

The player is an Oppo 970HD. It looks like new firmware is available that mentions better handling of subtitles, so I'll try that first. If that doesn't fix it, I'll try remaking the subtitles... the DVD player supports .srt, .smi, .idx, and .sub, according to the manual.
posted by xo at 11:09 AM on October 23, 2006