How can I get BeyondTV 4.6 to use subtitles?

[craigg75]

I have a DivX encoded avi movie that also has a seperate file for the subtitles with an extension of *.srt. I installed the directshow filter VobSub and the movie plays back with the subtitles perfectly in Windows Media Player however I can't get the subtitles to show up in BeyondTV 4.6. Has anyone else tried this? I searched the forums but mostly subtitles refer to DVDs or closed captioning.

Thanks,

Craig

[Fickey]

I don't fully understand subtitles vs CC, but maybe some of this info will help.
Closed Caption

[craigg75]

Closed captioning usually applies to live TV subtitles. The subtitles I'm talking about is subtitles you see like on a dvd movie. You can rip the dvd movie off a dvd and convert it to an avi and do the same with the subtitles (say its a foreign film and you need the english subtitles) and convert it to a srt file.

The link you sent me is people trying to get the closed captioning off of recorded mpgs using a haupaugge card. It looks like somebody came up with a mpg2srt post processing program to make that happen. That in itself is kind of cool, didn't know haupaugge had that capability built in. However they flip a trycc value in the settings.xml file to make the playback see the srt subtitles. But it looks like Snapstream has turned that function off in v4.6 unfortunately and it no longer works.

Anybody have any insight into how we can make the mpg decoder use the srt subtitle file. I have the cyberlink decoder but it doesn't work.

[merrypig]

The TryCC and directvobsub support are completely independant of each other, and for the record TryCC still works

TryCC doesn't load .srt files at all , it pulls the data directly from the mpeg2 data file as it's decoded.

The alternative requires that an application allows some intervention during the graph building (as opposed to specifically selecting filters and building the display graph one by one). I think SS's been back and forth on how that works and there's often some user config issues at work too - I generally don't use it so I'm probably not much help in solving it - but I suspect it's just a case of finding the right option for the vsfilter stuff so that it loads automatically. You might be able to trick it via the ffdshow stuff as I think they added the srt caption support to that recently.

The trick to try is using 3d acceleration instead of overlay - that might work better - or vice versa.

PS, I hear that the person who wrote the mpg2srt program is a totally amazing person. I just don't believe it myself. 8)

[craigg75]

I understand what you mean by reading the subtitles embedded in the mpeg stream. I tried the ffdshow subtitle settings but it didn't work. I guess that BeyondTV does not use the DirectVobSub directshow filter, it must use only the filters it's setup to use, ignoring all others. Since I've never done any development with BeyondTV I wouldn't know where to begin to force BeyondTV to recognize other filters.

Thanks for the response

[merrypig]

Essentially, btv has never loaded ffdshow or vsfilter directly. These filters can either raise their merit value so they get chosen over other default rendering filters or they can hijack the existing filters and load themselves instead. I'm guessing that if the mechanism is no longer working then SS is explicitly loading the filter they want to use and there's no opportunity for ffdshow etc to hook in.