Individual subtitles missing on DVD playback

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Individual subtitles missing on DVD playback

I'm having a problem of individual subtitles missing on a DVD I am creating for a client when playing back on a DVD player.

The DVD has 11 subtitle languages. The subtitles were brought into DSP via an stl document which I created. I can see all the subtitles perfectly on the track timeline and they play back correctly in the simulator however once I burn the disc on languages 1, 7 and 10 (English, Italian and Portuguese) have a subtitle missing part way through. It is the same subtitle missing for each language.

To make it stranger I have tested the disc on a number of different DVD players of different brands and it plays fine on some (5yr old Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo), missing completely on one (Pioneer), and looks corrupt on another (1yr old Sony)

I have managed to narrow down where the problem first appeared and it seems that when I had my project set up with the English subtitles on all the tracks (as temporary placeholders to check the authoring etc while we were waiting on translations to come through) there was no problem however as soon as I swapped out the English placeholders for the correct languages this problem appeared.

I have tried a number of things to solve this problem - changing the in point of the subtitle, the out point, the duration, recreating it manually in the track rather than through the stl import, retyping the subtitle, changing the fade timing of the subtitle but nothing has worked.

Has anyone seen this before or have any suggestions? I'd be grateful for any ideas.

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Junelle Ward

The Dub Shop

Wellington, NZ

DVD Studio Pro

Posted on Apr 10, 2013 2:24 PM

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Answer 1

RatVega™

Level 4

2,005 points

Apr 15, 2013 11:24 AM in response to jwpost

To be frank I've never done subtitles, but I've had issues with DVDSP from time-to-time... usually my fault. I also watch a lot of films with English subtitles and know that individual subtitles sometimes "disappear" in a flash.

Have you played the build file in DVD Player to determine whether the authoring or the playback hardware is at fault? If the build file plays OK in DVD Player, then the problem may be excessively high bitrates from all the subtitles. That might explain the varied behavior on different players.

It may be that the Build compiler is smart enough to see that all the subtitle tracks were the same when you were using English placeholders. This would explain the change in behavior once the languages changed. It's also possible that font choice or a large numbers of diacritical marks may play a role.

It is also possible that your DVDSP project is corrupt. I had an experience with that and nothing would fix the odd behavior. If you re-create the project, you may want to do it in phases, progressively adding languages so you can easily "back up" if things go bad again.

hope this helps

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