The art of ripping a DVD and converting it to a format, which can be played on both the Media Center and extenders (.mpg or .wmv), has been well covered on this forum and other forums.

However, some people may have problems keeping the subtitles. I ran into this problem when I ripped ‘The Godfather’ to MPEG. While the picture and sound were perfect, I lost the subtitles. When I ripped a more recent movie ‘BABEL’ I ran into the same problem. So I decided to find a fix.

The first place I looked was here on TGB (as usual), and all I found was a few threads with no fix. I done a bit of searching on the web and found a workable solution.

Subtitles on a DVD are usually not on the video stream, which is why they’re lost when converting to .mpg or .wmv. So the subtitles need to be ripped separately and rendered directly back into the finished video file.

I convert all my DVD’s to .mpg (I was using .wmv but changed to .mpg because I have a problem with .wmv files following my Vista upgrade) so these are the steps involved for .mpg files.

1. Rip and convert the DVD in the usual way. (You end up with an .mpg file)
2. Use SubRip to rip the subtitles from the original .vob file. (You end up with an .srt file)
3. For the next step I had to use a good video editor (which supports subtitles). I used Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus (Only the Plus version supports 5.1 sound). I could not find a free video editor that could do this.
4. Launch Ulead, and open the .mpg file.
5. Click on the overlay tab and select title ‘T’.
6. Click on the option to use a subtitle file and select the .srt file.
7. Click on the share tab and select ‘Create file’
8. Select ‘MPG optimiser’, which will output the file keeping everything the same as the original (including quality and 5.1) and only re-rendering the parts where the subtitles are.

That’s it. When you play back the file in Media Center or extender, you will see the subtitles.

TIPS:

When ripping the subtitles with SubRip, make sure you select the correct subtitle stream. I discovered one stream had the subtitles for even the English words in the movie (which you don’t want if you speak English). Another stream had subtitles for other sounds in the movie like (Foot steps) or (Wind blowing) which must be for people who are deaf. SubRip has a viewer so it’s easy to pick the right one.

Ulead allowed me to select the font for the subtitles, which I recommend changing to Ariel (Default: Times New Roman). The reason for this is because (in my case), when I used SubRip to rip the movie BABEL, it got confused between uppercase I and lowercase L. So on my first attempt I ended up with subtitles in the movie like “It’s AIImost new”. But I did it again and selected Ariel and it works perfect because with the Ariel font, the same character is used for uppercase I and lowercase L.

For anyone converting to .wmv, there is an option I noticed when I use to use DVD-WMV, which allowed selecting a subtitles file. But I don’t know how well it works, as I have never done it.

Can dvr-ms or .ts files contain subtitles?

Also, which part of The Godfather did you have trouble with.  My english subtitles show up during the italian parts just fine.  This is a ripped main movie mpeg2.

The .mpg file (With subtitles) could be converted to dvr-ms without loosing them.

I don't know about .ts files.

All of The Godfather lost the subtitles when I converted from .vob to .mpg.

Maybe some versions have the subtitles embeded in the video itself.

Is there a better or updated way to keep subtitles now that 2 years have passed?  This way seems pretty crude for today’s technology.