US DVD Subtitles – Fixing Them

I learned how to replace the subtitle track on my US Let The Right One In DVD by following this tutorial. However that tutorial is about performing this task on any DVD, and to get it right for my DVD it required a little bit of trial and error. I thought people might appreciate a tutorial specifically for the US Let The Right One In DVD. Hopefully with this tutorial available people will go ahead and buy whichever version of the DVD they can find without waiting to find the one with the theatrical subtitles.

The first step is to get yourself a US Let The Right One In DVD. The second step is to download the following programs and the srt subtitle file (all freeware):

The next step is to create a few folders on your hard disk. These folders will be used to store things at various stages in the process. The following are the folders you will need and the approximate amount of disk space they will eventually require:

Original (this folder is optional) 5.41GB
Demuxed 4.16GB
Remuxed 4.25GB
Reauthored 5.36GB
Total free space required 19.18GB

If you want to save some space you can skip making the Original folder, which will reduce the free space requirement to 13.77GB. This will also make some processing steps take longer because reading things from the DVD is slower than reading them from your hard disk. The tutorial assumes that you will not create this folder. However if you do choose to create the Original folder, your next step would be to copy the contents of the VIDEO_TS folder at the top level of the DVD file structure to your Original folder. When following the tutorial, whenever it talks about finding a file on the DVD, you will instead find it in your Original folder.

Unzip and run PCGDemux. When you have launched PCGDemux the first thing to do is to click on the “Browse” button in the input IFO field and navigate to the drive containing the DVD.

You want to select the VTS_02_0.IFO in the VIDEO_TS folder at the top level of the DVD file structure.

In the “Output Folder” section click on “Browse’ and select the Demuxed folder that you just created. In the “Mode” section select “by PGC”. In the “PGC Selection” section under “Domain” select “Titles”. If you have selected the right IFO file the window should display “PGC # 01 -> 01:54:29.26”. In the “Options” section make sure that only the following boxes are checked:

  • Demux video stream
  • Demux all audio streams
  • Demux all subpic streams
  • Create CellTimes.txt

Now click on “Process!” and let it crank for a bit while you go grab yourself a beverage or surf the web. When you come back, you should find the following in your Demuxed folder:

If you are feeling cautious then rename the file “Subpictures_20.sup” to something like “Subpictures_20.sup.old”. Otherwise you can just delete it.

Next install and run SubtitleCreator. Go to the File menu and select “Open text subtitles” and choose the Let.the.Right.One.In.srt file. Go to the File menu and select “Open palette (IFO, …)” and choose the same IFO file from the DVD as you did earlier (the VTS_02_0.IFO in the VIDEO_TS folder on the DVD):

Now the window of SubtitleCreator should look like this:

If you don’t happen to be as enamored of Ashley Judd as the program’s author, just remember that the program is free. One other thing to note is that SubtitleCreator doesn’t understand ASCII characters with diacriticals. If you look at subtitle number 5 in the SubtitleCreator window, the last word should be “Ångby” but instead it is a bit garbled. The subtitle will appear on the screen garbled this way as well. As far as I know, the only words in the subtitle track with diacriticals are “Ångby”, “Vällingby”, and “Gösta”. These words will be garbled on screen. Once again, just remember that the program is free. If this really bothers you, you can open the Let.the.Right.One.In.srt file in Notepad or some other text editor and change the diacritical characters to their plain ASCII equivalents before you load the srt file into SubtitleCreator.

Now go to the “Synchronize” menu and select “Convert frame rate”. In the “Convert frame rate” window enter 24 on the “from” side and 24.00337 on the “to” side then click “Apply”. Next go back to the “Synchronize” menu and select “Set time delay (+/-)”. in the “Set Delay (+/-)” window enter “+00:00:01,686” and click on “Apply”. Go to the File menu and select “Save SUP as…”. Navigate to your Demuxed folder and save the SUP file there as “Subpictures_20.sup”. If all goes well you should see the following message:

The next step is to run Muxman. The Muxman window looks like this:

In the “Video” section click on the “…” button and choose “VideoFile.m2v” from your “Demuxed’ folder. In the “Audio” section, first make sure that “Stream:” is set to 1. Click on the Audio section “…” button and choose “AudioFile_80.ac3” from your Demuxed folder. In “Language:” select “Swedish sv”. Click the up arrow in the “Stream:” field so that 2 is selected. Go and choose “AudioFile_81.ac3” from your Demuxed folder and select “Swedish sv” as the language. Repeat these steps for Audio streams 3 & 4 according to the following table. When you have finished all four, scroll back through them and compare the settings to this table:

Stream File Language
1 AudioFile_80.ac3 Swedish sv
2 AudioFile_81.ac3 Swedish sv
3 AudioFile_82.ac3 English en
4 AudioFile_83.ac3 English en

In the “SubPictures” section do very much the same thing. First make sure that “Stream:” is set to 1, then click on the “…” button and choose “Subpictures_20.sup” from your Demuxed folder. In “Language:” select “English en”. Click on both the “LB” and “Wide” buttons so both are selected. Then repeat these steps for Subpicture streams 2 & 3 using the settings from the following table:

Stream File Language
1 Subpictures_20.zip English en
2 Subpictures_21.zip English en
3 Subpictures_22.zip Spanish es

At the bottom in the “Destination folder:” section click on the “…” button and choose your Remuxed folder. Finally, go to the “File” menu and select “Import Chapter”. Choose the “Celltimes.txt” file that should have been created in your Demuxed folder. These were a lot of settings to make, so if you are feeling conservative, go to the “File” menu and select “Save Project” to save these settings off to a file just in case for some reason you need to repeat remuxing. Then click on “Start”.

Once Muxman has completed its work, open the VobBlanker program. In the “Input Video Manager” section click on the “Browse” button and choose the file “VTS_TS.IFO” in the VIDEO_TS folder of the DVD. At this point the VobBlanker window should look something like this:

In the “Output Folder” section click on the “Browse” button and choose your Reauthored folder. In the “TitleSet” section click on the row of the TitleSet “VTS_02_*.VOB”. Down below in the “PGCs in Selected TitleSet” section a row beginning with “01 OneSeq’ should appear. Click on that row to select it. Now click on the “Replace” button and choose the “VTS_01_0.IFO” in your Remuxed folder. Here also it might be a good idea to go to the “File” menu and select “Save Project as” and save these settings to a file in case you need to repeat this step. Now click “PROCESS!!”. VobBlanker will chew on all of this for quite a while – depending upon the speed of your computer. When it is done, the “Process Log” window should look like this:

If everything went well, you should now be able to go to your Reauthored folder and play the movie with a DVD playing program like vlc or GOM Player. To check that the subtitles are correct, go to the time in the film around 00:13:08 and Eli should say that she lives right there in the jungle gym. If the subtitles look good then you are almost done. The contents of your Reauthored folder look like this:

The final step is to burn the contents of the Reauthored folder onto a blank DVD. I do not know of any freeware program for doing this, so you will have to buy Nero, or Toast, or some similar program. When you burn the DVD, you need to create two folders: AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS. The AUDIO_TS folder should be empty, and the VIDEO_TS folder should end up with the contents of your Reauthored folder. If I am not explaining this well, just go and look at the file structure of your original DVD.

That’s it. Now you have a DVD with the theatrical subtitles. In fact, you can now even customize the subtitles to your liking. If as I do you prefer Magnolia’s translation of Eli’s note to the theatrical translation, all you have to do is make that change in the srt file with Notepad and then repeat this process. Easy.