Encoding YAY

[Bucket]

Does someone want to explain to a guy whose brain shuts down at overly-convoluted concepts how he's supposed to take an .AVI and a .SSA (?!?!?) file, and come out with a subtitled DVD?

Fucking around so far reveals that two programs meant to handle the situation... don't. Sub Station Alpha doesn't actually seem to DO anything with .AVI files, it only makes subtitles (yay). VirtualDub supposedly takes .SSA files and adds them to the .AVI, but XviD is unsupported. That some great forethought on the part of the guy who made these files, let me tell you.

[Planky]

doom9.net has some good guides, if you haven't already been there. I haven't actually dealt with sub titles myself.

[Bloodshedder]

Huh? I'm able to encode a video in XViD using an SSA file with VirtualDub just fine.

Or are you saying it doesn't support encoding FROM an XViD AVI?

[chilvence]

Virtualdub should work with anything you have a codec installed for, I'm pretty sure...

[Bucket]

Well, I made do with Media Player Classic. It's a good program; kind enough to put the subtitles on for me. I guess I'm good for the moment, even though I'll never have a playable DVD out of it. (I actually did try it-- no subtitles, reduced video quality and the sound was out of sync. AWESOME!)
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Somewhat related:

I'm going to take a stab in the dark here and assume that BitTorrent doesn't allow downloads to be messed with until the entire thing is done and hashed?

I have a great many AVI files here, half are done and half aren't. I tried previewing one to make sure I didn't get crap, but no player will accept it.

WMP10: "Windows cannot play the file specified, etc."
QT: "Not a movie file"
MPClassic: "Cannot render the file"
GSpot: "Non-AVI File, type unknown"

Do I have to wait until it's done, or am I downloading trash? More pertinent question: should I just stick to newsgroups?

[Planky]

You might have some luck using this to view uncompleted avi's. Granted it was designed for kazaa's uncomplete files, but you never know.

[Bloodshedder]

If you think "half" are done, meaning you're 50% done with the download, then it's unlikely that any single AVI is fully completed. Get a better client that lets you see which files in the torrent are finished downloading. Some will even let you set by-file priorities so you can set certain ones to a higher priority so they're more likely to finish completely first.

[chilvence]

Yeah, I haven't tried any others but Azureus does a good job of all that (no previewing though). In answer to your other question, Torrents are by far the most reliable file-filching vessel I've seen so far. I've downloaded loads of huge stuff ranging between 2 and 8 gigs without stumbling across anything particularly bad.

Now excuse me while I say three hail Mary's.

[deathz0r]

Bucket said:

I'm going to take a stab in the dark here and assume that BitTorrent doesn't allow downloads to be messed with until the entire thing is done and hashed?

Can't be easily done with BitTorrent, since it uses hashes contain parts of the file. You have to be lucky and hope that you have enough downloaded from the very start to be able to view it.

stuff about subtitles

I use plain text files for subtitles. I've used them with ffdshow's subtitle filter for VirtualDub (make sure to copy ffvdub.vdf from wherever you installed ffdshow to virtualdub\plugins) and it works perfectly. Check out the videos down the bottom for proof that it's so freakin easy.

As for the plain text files themselves, they follow a rather simple format:

00:00:01:deathz0r Online: The Internet Made Stupid
00:00:03:by deathz0r
00:00:04:
00:00:05:To start off, here's "Die, damnit"
00:00:07:
00:00:08:"I see dead h4x0rz"
00:00:10:
00:00:17:"Pit Of DOOM"
00:00:19:
00:00:24:"Gothic Skullfuck Makeup Starters Kit"
00:00:26:
00:00:34:"The Fun House"
00:00:36:
00:00:50:Damn straight I own!

You can use milliseconds as well, but I didn't need a use for them.