Doctor M's ÜberGuide for -Full- PAL to NTSC DVD Conversion v2.0 — Page 3

I still have it and will update the guide in a few days.  Honestly I was just overly optimistic that the BDSup2Sub issue wasn't that common or that they'd just fix the darn thing.

Anyway, the first method is kind of a quick and dirty fix by retiming and repositioning the subtitles.  It doesn't resize them and if there is positional information it can make a mess of things.

The other way actually involves using a program to batch resize every subpicture and then you rebuild it into a new .sup.

Neither was a great answer... I should go see if I can get the guy working on the program to look at it again.

My completely uninformed guess is that the error is in how they interlace the subtitle images.  "Smart" deinterlacers such as you'd find in software players, upscaling DVD players, and Blu-ray players can probably handle it, but dumb deinterlacers in TV sets cannot.  I believe I've seen this before but I thought it was a one-off--I don't have good equipment for testing it...

For what it's worth, I think BDSup2Sub-created files currently have two player compatibility problems.

First, the BD subs work fine on all hardware players I've tested and on MPC, but flash for an instant and disappear on VLC.  I've found that you can "fix" BD-SUP files created by BDSup2Sub by running them through BDSupEdit (just open and re-save the file, no changes).  The resulting file then works fine on both MPC and VLC, and I suspect it will also work on a hardware player although I haven't tested that yet.

Second, the DVD subs wiggle around on some hardware players (still not sure what the criteria are for which ones do this).  I've found that if you use BDSup2Sub to create a SUB/IDX file, and then use SubToSup to create a SUP file, the resulting SUP file is different than the SUP file that would have been created directly from BDSup2Sub (binary compare shows they are different).  How different?  Fixed?  That part I don't know yet, I'm still looking for good test hardware.  I thought maybe Doctor M could try it out.

Anyway, I'm pretty reliant on BDSup2Sub for a lot of heavy lifting on my project, so finding a simple process to fix these issues without having to completely replace my existing processes is appealing to me.

I hate to keep spamming your thread, but here are my results--the BD-SUP method mentioned above is a winner for that particular quirk, but the DVD method doesn't do anything about the jitter.

The DVD player I was able to find that had the jittering effect was one that seemed to always output for a 4:3 display.  It was old and had no option to specify 16:9.  And I noticed that the jittery subtitles were shifted down in the frame from where I'd expect them to have been on a 16:9 display, so I believe it was doing something unique to the subtitles because of the display aspect ratio, even though the video content was anamorphic and it dealt with that fine.

I do not know if the player has to be in 4:3 output mode for this bug to get triggered, but that seems like a good lead.  Encoding the subs on the DVD as LB or WIDE didn't seem to change the behavior at all.  And the shimmering is not consistent either--some lines are almost perfectly stable, others are a jittery mess.

Do DVD subtitles contain both embedded LB and WIDE variations?  Is it possible the LB variant is screwed up and the WIDE one is fine, or that the LB variant is missing and the player tries to apply the WIDE one to the wrong AR somehow?

DVD subtitles can be built as either one track for all formats or 2 separate merged tracks where one is automatically activated for WS and the other LBX.

The thing is, if you are using a program like BDSup2Sub you are working with a specific version. 

In other words when you rip the tracks from a DVD the tracks rip separately and need to be resize and/or retimed separately.

Seriously, I will dig into this more next week.  This is a terrible weekend for me.

I'm also thinking of making another important change: converting the guide to use Eac3to.  It's a lot more direct for a lot of the audio conversions and is fairly mature.

Except for audio tracks where you need SoundTouch, it's can do everything else including DTS conversions and slowdown in one step.

For what it's worth, using a Perl script, ImageMagick, and an old version of BDSup2Sub, I think I've found a way to remove this jitter in a more-or-less automated fashion.  I'm still checking for bugs but things are very promising (my first "successful" run introduced some color problems, and I can't be sure there aren't other surprises lurking in there)

First off, you made an observation in another forum that you can check a subtitle for this problem by opening it in DVDSubEdit, enabling the zoom window, and then adjusting the vertical position.  If the image in the zoom window wobbles up and down one pixel as you adjust the position, the subtitle has this problem--otherwise it's good.  This is a nice way of testing if you don't have easy access to a problematic hardware player (or an endless stack of DVD-R's :-/ ).

Second, the problem seems to be caused entirely by cropping.  To fix this problem, BDSUp2Sub should not only avoid autocropping DVD subtitle formats, but should also actively UNCROP already-cropped subtitles if they are being output in a DVD format.  Uncropping the subs nearly doubles the file size, so I can see why a developer may choose not to implement this fix for a problem that affects so few(?) devices.  BDSup2Sub 4.0.1 (my preferred version because of its wildcard handling), allows the command line argument /acrop:0 which prevents cropping of uncropped sources, but it does nothing to fix already-cropped sources (and it doesn't work at all for GUI operations).

Assuming all goes well, I'll share my Perl script and instructions.  They are designed to work specifically with my project and will need some tweaks before they can be a more general-purpose solution.  For example, my scripts use 720p BD-SUP files as the source for the DVD subs, and all scripts assume the subs are widescreen.  Also, this was a quick-and-dirty solution, so the complete lack or error handling and horrifying code passing itself off as an XML parser may need some touching up.

This is a busy week for me too so don't expect too much right now.

Well it turns off I'm terrible at putting things off.  Here is a (not permanent) link to the portion of the Project Threepio files that are applicable here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/3283096184/DVD-resources.rar

The instructions are in the _README.html, in the section about converting to other formats.  Hope this helps.  I probably will not be able to assist in writing any more code, but I could answer questions if that helps someone else get some use out of this.

I agree, autosizing is 100% the problem.  I've loaded subtitles int BDSup2Sub and output them supposedly unchanged... and it has the jitter.

Frankly, I'm not even sure it is a needed step, but there is definitely something wrong with the method used.

If you have an idea on how they can fix it, I urge you to go to the Doom9 thread where they're working on this and help them out.

Well, the only good fix is to actually uncrop all subtitles when they are output in a DVD format--everything else is a half-measure to some degree.  The doubling of the filesize is concerning for media as space-limited as DVD, but I guess if it was optional there'd be no room to complain about that.

Wait so you are outputing from BDSup2Sub and then doing something to uncrop?  I must have missed that bit.

Yeah, my process goes roughly like this:

1) You start with a subtitle in any state, in any format, made by any software.

2) BDSup2Sub converts the subtitle into a collection of DVD-sized PNGs and an XML file.  This collection is cropped.

3) The Perl script converts this collection into another collection of uncropped DVD-sized PNGs and an XML file.

4) You can then use BDSup2Sub with the /acrop:0 flag to convert this second collection back into a DVD subtitle.  And it's uncropped!

I'm making some updates to the guide.

I'm hoping to better sort out the subtitle section, switch to the use of eac3to, and some other updates/fixes.

Any requests/suggestions?

It might not matter to a huge number of people here, but the latest free version of Muxman contains some errors.  The language codes for Indonesian, Javanese, Hebrew, and Yiddish are incorrect, so if you make DVDs with subtitles (or audio) in those languages using Muxman, your player may or may not be able to identify the language of that track in its language selection menus (some players know about the language code errors and can successfully identify them, others follow the spec more strictly and don't).

I made a customized Muxman executable for Project Threepio which uses the correct codes for these languages, so DVDs have better compatibility on this front.  I don't know if you plan to distribute binaries as part of the guide or not, but you could certainly include my customized binary.  If not, I suppose you can reference the Project Threepio project thread for people who wanted to get the modified binary.

benduwan said:

is there a easier way to convert pal to ntsc or ntsc to pal?
i´m not so technical…
thanks

There are several all in one programs that will do the conversion, but results will vary, you probably won’t have the original menus and it takes a human to analyze the source to know the proper conversion method.

I noticed all the images are gone.
I also should roll back the subtitle conversion details to just repositioning since I’ve never liked how resized subs look.
Should probably replace audio conversion steps with EAC3TO since it’s a mature one stop solution.

The question is, does anyone still refer to this guide?