dcunningham.net

While doing a bunch of testing on the next release of Encode360, I’ve come across a very peculiar problem…

It was discovered by Dave Schlicky that Matroska videos with subtitles, which display fine in Windows Media Player, don’t get subtitles when encoded to WMV by Encode360. I don’t use MKV’s so I never noticed the problem before, so I got myself a few sample videos and did some testing. Starting out with a clean machine, with K-Lite Codec Pack installed (so I had Haali Spliiter and DirectVobSub), subtitles are displayed fine in WMP, but not when encoded with Encode360. Ok, so bug in my code somewhere right? No, apparently not. It seems Windows Media Encoder doesn’t even get subtitles burnt onto the WMV

In fact, DirectVobSub doesn’t even seem to get loaded when encoding. You can verify this yourself by enabling the systray icon. When WMP is playing the file, it appears alongside the Haali and ffdshow systray icons. When encoding, DirectVobSub is no longer there, although the other two are present.

Maybe this is because DirectVobSub is a VfW filter and not a DMO filter (which WME will only recognise)? I’m not sure. I can’t find any information about this anywhere so maybe someone can confirm this for me.

In the meantime, it looks like if you have a MKV with embedded subs, you’ll have to rip these out to a seperate SRT file and let ffdshow handle subs instead of DirectVobSub. Otherwise, no subs.

Update: I’ve thrown together a quick guide on how to extract the subs. See here: http://dcunningham.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10
Dan