32 subtitles

[the britisher]

Hi all

I have a very frustrating problem, and I'm wondering if anyone else has come across this: I have DVD with four movies, each movie has 20 seperate subtitle tracks (twenty languages (nightmare I know ) Anyway I can only put eight subtitle tracks on each of the movies adding the 9th or more stops the DVD from playing in a set-top player.

Now I haven't tried them on every player in the world, but I have tried my DVD on about twenty different machines. Now I realise that 4 x 8 = 32 but Ulead's technical support assured me that that means each movie on the DVD can support up to 32 separate subtitle tracks. Everything else works just fine. Also the DVD seems to work OK on a software based player

Any ideas?

[Devil]

Have you thought that the restriction may be in the set-top player? The obvious work-around is to burn different versions for different language regions. Alternatively, you could meld your four titles into a single one in an editor.

[the britisher]

That's exactly what I did, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Three DVDs with 8, 8 and four movies. The client wasn't too happy though.

I get your point about set-top DVD players however, as a test, I set up the same DVD using Adobe Encore and it worked fine- go figure. My experience with Ulead tech support was pretty disappointing too, I spoke to a least three individuals none of which seemed to have much of a clue.

I like DVD WS2 but there are some bugs that still need to be fixed.

Thanks anyway Devil

[Devil]

My experience with Ulead tech support was pretty disappointing too, I spoke to a least three individuals none of which seemed to have much of a clue.

I have no need to defend Ulead support or otherwise. However, can you really expect support people to be able to answer such an unusual kind of question? I doubt whether even the programmers could answer the question off the cuff, they would have to examine the code to see whether it was a bug or not and that could take a long time.

In a former life, I did quite a bit of programming for technical applications. One case does come to mind. My UK agent, who was reasonably technically savvy, was asked a question about how a certain calculation was made because something appeared to be going wrong. He phoned me to forward the question and the only thing I was able to tell him on the fly was that the operation included a Gauss-Newton curve fit, but he was able to fax me the user's resultant curve, which was not very good. It took me a day to change the curve fit to a sixth order least square polynomial type, which complicated the subsequent analysis operations as there was much more data to handle. The following day, I tested the change on as many curves as I could generate and did a few tweaks and finally compiled it and was able to UPS a diskette with the modded software to my agent. The customer was able to have the corrected software within a week of his first call to my agent and was happy with the service. He did not complain that my agent was unable to answer his question, nor did he complain that the reiterative curve fit was slower (considerably).

Some years later, I was reselling (and beta testing) a complex ECAD system. A user complained about a problem which I was able to duplicate and deem to be a bug without a workaround. I e-mailed the head programmer about 10 am. I had a patch resolving it by 4.30 pm the same day, which I promptly forwarded: total time <12 hours.

In both cases, the programming teams were very small (2 and 3 persons resp.) The Ulead teams are large (see the splash screen in About) and such response would be clearly impossible, assuming the person who programmed the dll in question is still in the team.

So I do believe your complaint about the service is perhaps bordering on the unreasonable. I have little doubt the point has been noted and passed on. Whether it will be acted on with a future SP or version is yet to be seen.

Have you tried reporting a bug to Microsoft? If it is a bug that will seriously affect many users, their best response time is 3 - 6 months. I have had a trial dll back from Ulead within 1 - 2 weeks.

[the britisher]

Hi Devil,

Thanks for the reply which I understood fully.

I didn't mean to sound unreasonable and apologise if it came across that way. What I should have said was that Ulead technical support – in my experience – is almost completely and utterly useless, rude, difficult to get hold of, and doesn’t return e-mails.

The reason I say this is that my experience went something like this: I spent many hours trying to solve the problem myself including completely reformatting my workstation and re-installing DVD WS on it’s own. I then patched it and the problem continued.

I then created a new project and simply placed four movies with a very simple menu and created 20 subtitles for each movie at arbitrary points with arbitrary text. Burnt the project to DVD and well. . .

SAME PROBLEM! Adding more than 32 subtitles to a DVD even if they are spread across four separate movies (which are supposed to be capable of handling 32 EACH) crashes all the set top DVD players I tried (more than twenty). And I mean CRASHES so you have to pull the plug out of the wall and put it back in to “reboot” them.

So, as you can imagine, I’m a little frustrated at this point! I have followed all the basic rules of trouble shooting and I now think I need help from ULEAD.

A call to ULEAD: managed after being on hold to get through to UK tech support I spoke to three separate tech support people who simply didn’t know and worst, sounded uninterested. This happens over a period of about two days. I’m not getting anywhere with UK tech support.

Thinking, I’ll be clever, I contact the US tech support (by phone). This time it’s different, the guy I speak to is polite enough and even sounds like he wants to help. He e-mails an escalation form and the contact details of whom I need to send it to. (I explained the problem very clearly)

But – and this is the clincher, that was 11 MONTHS AGO! I carried on sending e-mails for a couple of months and then gave up, the project was finished by then and as you will note from my previous post, I went for the obvious work-around.

Sorry for the long post, but I wanted you to understand that I don’t think I was being even borderline unreasonable. Without a single reply from ULEAD I can only assume one of two things: either, the problem is too difficult to fix with a patch, and they’re ignoring me, or it’ll get fixed in some future version of the app. Either way, I don’t think it was me who was unreasonable.

Regards

the britisher

[GeorgeW]

At any time, did you see a message about overlapping subtitles

How are the Timecodes of your subtitles -- is the START always > than the last END

[the britisher]

Definately not, I did all the timming in Premier (frame by frame) and I'm aware that you need at least one frame between one sub and another. There were definately no overlaps.