Subtitles: I still don't get it.

[DrNorm]

Here's my situation. I have an episode of Deadwood downloaded from my Replay TV. I modified the rtvccdump program and created another program that together extract and create a DVD Workshop 2.0 subtitle text file from the closed captioning.

The file is in the correct format. When I go into the subtitle editor, I import that text file and everything (start and end times, text, position, etc.) look correct.

But when I play the file within the subtitle editor (for example)....

The opening subtitle appears correctly, starting and ending at the proper timestamp. But after that, NONE of the other subtitles appear on the screen. If I click on a particular subtitle start time, the jog bar goes to that spot and I see the subtitle on the screen. But as soon as I hit Play, all subtitles disappear.

Any ideas? If I haven't provided enough info, please tell me what you'd like to see.

[Devil]

I suggest you try the following:

Create any ad hoc subtitle file and check that it works. Then convert it to a txt file. Carefully compare the header and footer with those of your file and see whether there is a difference.

I've seen a number of complaints that files imported from other applications sometimes misbehave.

[DrNorm]

Well I did as you suggested. One immediate difference noted was that the imported file was in ASCII, but the text file created by Workshop is Unicode.

However, I then saved my imported file, thereby creating an equivalent Unicode version. I compared the headers and footers of the ad hoc file and my cc file and found no difference.

The only differences I could see were that my file had each subtitle text preceded by a blank (removing the blanks didn't help) and that there were overlaps in my file. However fixing the first five or six overlaps didn't help. I can't believe that the existence of overlaps later in the sequence would cause this problem earlier.

I'm still at a loss.

[Devil]

Overlaps are anathema: you have to remove all of them. Dunno about the leading space. Unicode is used to allow s/ts in non-Latin characters.