Phantom menace subtitles - solution found after many years!

[Katie Boundary]

I have the 2008 two-disc DVD versions of the original and prequel Star Wars movies. My goal is to convert them all to something more portable, with all the alien jibberish properly subtitled in English but with nothing else subbed. Workflow involves VSrip (VobSub Ripper) to extract the subs to .sub and .idx files, and Gabest's Vobsub Virtualdub plugin to burn them into the video stream. Episodes 3 and 5 had no alien dialog to worry about, and episodes 2, 4, and 6 were all easy. Episode I, however, has been kicking my ass. English sub tracks 00 and 01 are "all or nothing" - everything is subtitled and nothing is forced, so if I select "forced subtitles only" in VSrip, then it erases everything. English tracks 02, 03, 06, and 07, as well as Spanish tracks 04 and 05, SEEM to be empty whether I select "forced subtitles only" or not.

I've been aware of this problem for years. I kept coming back to it for a variety of reasons, like my discovery that the "stable" vobsub 1.006 had a bug that would erase subtitles in the latter half of a movie or TV episode, which was fixed in the "unstable" version 1.007, but I kept hitting the same dead-end. Today, figuring that I have almost a year of sobriety under my belt and there would never be a better time to try again, I did, and failed again... until I noticed something unusual. During one of the scenes that should have had subtitled, I noticed, near the bottom of the screen, where the subtitles should have been, a sort of... flicker, or shift. As if I was looking at a new keyframe in the middle of the shot in a low-bitrate video stream. Going back and forth in time a few frames, I finally realized what I was looking at: TRANSPARENT subtitles! Almost transparent, anyway. Like 95% transparent. Not opaque enough to make out more than a few letters in each frame, but enough to be able to tell that they were in fact letters. I decided to play with the "custom colors" options and finally got the subs to appear! HOORAY!

Also, I can now confirm that Episode IV is not the only "Star Wars" movie to have a subtitle track that puts the word "Lucas" at the top of the screen during a totally random part of the movie. Episode I has such a scene as well, right after Jar-jar gets his ass kicked by Sebulba. English sub tracks 06 and 07 are the offenders.



So, I'm just letting you all know... if you're ever having trouble with missing subtitles, this might be what's happening.

[chros]

Originally Posted by Katie Boundary

Also, I can now confirm that Episode IV is not the only "Star Wars" movie to have a subtitle track that puts the word "Lucas" at the top of the screen during a totally random part of the movie. Episode I has such a scene as well, right after Jar-jar gets his ass kicked by Sebulba. English sub tracks 06 and 07 are the offenders.

Nice, new ways for predictive programming