Anamorphic output and forced subtitles help

[alexcel]

Hi:

I just wanted to ask for a couple of, in my opinion, key features:

• Ability to output anamorphic video
  
• Better support to choose the right subtitle stream

I live in PAL world and I want to encode my own movies to h.264 with very good quality. If I use non anamorphic video I lose a lot of resolution (from 720x576) to (720x400), and then encode in h.264, thus adding a second quality drop. I can't increase 720 to 848 or 1024 as many standalone players won't play the encoded video.

For the second question, I usually want to keep the "forced" subtitles, the ones that are needed in my language to understand some scene. In my country, there are two ways to do this:

• A second subtitle stream is added with only a few subtitles (the forced ones), although usually the stream is marked as non-forced
  
• Make some subtitles really "forced" in a general subtitle stream

To know if there are any "forced" subtitle streams, we need to know:

1. The size of the subtitle streams. Low size streams (<1MB) usually equal forced ones
   
2. Whether there are really forced subtitles in a stream or not

I guess that the only way to do this is to perform a complete subtitle streams analysis prior to the stream selection phase. As this thorough analysis could take some time, I guess that this should be optional.

right now I have to use DVDShrink to learn the size of every stream, and if there are not small size streams I have to use vobsub to know if there are really forced subtitles. In the end, I have to waste a lot of time to find those forced subtitles.

With these to features, DVDFab could be the all-in-one solution.:iagree:

Thanks!!!

[signals]

I too have requested features like this from the developers of DVDFab to allow easier handling/manipulation of subpictures and I think it is on the “to-do” list. In the meantime, try DVDSubEdit by jeanl. It is very fast and will allow you to filter subpic streams for viewing based on a number of characteristics (including forced or normal start) and will force or un-force any subpic or the entire stream. It is free. Low size streams are not always the forced ones, or may not always be translations.

Here is a llink to the author’s page for DVDSubEdit: http://download.videohelp.com/DVDSubEdit/

Re: anamorphic output
Do you mean to take widescreen flat (non-anamorphic) video and make it anamorphic? I have never tried this but I think you could do it with manipulation of the settings or profiles in DVD to Mobile. It sometimes comes out that way by accident (if you turn on automatic cropping of an anamorphic movie, choose “supported by device” in Advanced Resolution Settings and then choose a 1.3333:1 output aspect ratio). See if that produces the effect you are looking for.

Here’s one I just tried: