[vlc] BUG? Forced subtitles of DVD not showing

[Stefan Sigmund]

Hello!

I have a problem: I produce a video in 9 different languages. There is no speech in it, only subtitles. They all should fit on a CD. So instead of encoding 9 H.264-Videos (total length will be about 5-8 minutes) for each language I thought about burning a Mini-DVD (same as DVD, only on a CD) - so I tried to use forced subtitles, that are always shown. The subtitles have to be pictures to fit in fine, but that's no problem, when mastering a DVD.
For the moment I just saved a VIDEO_TS folder on my harddisk for testing. In the Mac OS X DVD-Player it works just as expected - if there is an unsupported language set for subtitles it always shows the english subtitles, if you select a supported language those subtitles are shown. Everything is just fine.
But the video should play mainly on Windows-Computers and VLC would be the player of choice. But when I open the VIDEO_TS folder, there are NO subtitles shown, until you select one from the menu. That is not the behavior of a normal DVD-Player. If subtitles are forced to show (i.e. if the video makes no sense without them) they should show up automatically and can't be turned of. (you can just select another language)

I use VLC 1.0.3 - so I guess it is a bug of VLC not showing forced subtitles. I could now do a workaround and embed the pictures of english subtitles in the video directly - and if someone selects another language (or english) the pictures of the other languages show above english with a solid background (light yellow in my case), so they cover the english text in the video. I think, I will do it that way … so I can keep forced subtitles for DVD player that work normally, but if the player does not show a subtitle automatically (as it should), there are still the pictures with the english text in the video.

I just wanted to tell you that VLC does not behave correctly when a DVD uses forced subtitles. Maybe it will work, when the video is burnt to disc, but I guess not. It would be nice, if you could fix this in the next release.

Thanks and
Best Regards,
Stefan Sigmund