Crash with vsfilter/vobsub including, possible, separate, problem, always

andy

Hi,
I have a problem with vobsub/vsfilter I have 24 movies in the divx format. They all are made in the same way including separate subtitle files in vobsub format.
When I play some of those movies (4) including the subtitle with vobsub 2.23 the player will crash with an error pointing to vobsub. Any player will do that. WMP, Zoomplayer etc. And always on exact the same moment in the same movie. Here after I need to kill the player with my taskmanager. It is not possible to quit in a normal way.

Sometimes it is possible to start al over and skip 'the fatal second' and go on, sometimes it is not possible.

It is not system depended, it happens on three different computers.

I read some articles about crashes in the old versions of vobsub. So I removed it and installed and registered the new vsfilter 2.33.
That made a difference. Now the movies won't start at all and the crash occurs immediately.
Does anybody recognize this?

I don't know if vobsub chokes on funny characters, but at a wild guess I will ask: do those 4 films have special characters in the filename?
Because you crash on 3 systems, it's only those 4 movies, and I never heard of something like that before.

The 'funniest' character is a space in the filename. But not all of them have it. If I rename the movie to A.avi, A.idx, A.ifo and A.sub I still have the crash.
Now I'm running with version 2.23 again. That is the one that works the best, it runs until the crashtime. Version 2.33 won't even start when there is a 'bad' sub.
Just a couple of hours ago I saw an other crash with a new episode. Exactly at 33:14. So the movie starts, I can watch it for 33 minutes and 14 secs. Then the crash occurs. If I start over and skip the movie to 32 minutes, it happens after 1:14. When I go to 33 minutes and try to skip 'over' it with my one minute advance button (Zoomplayer) I get the crash. But when I start the movie at 44 minutes and skip backwards to 34 minutes there is no crash at all and I can watch the rest of the movie. There is something inside the subtitle files that makes it happen.
And it is not only on my HTPC. It happens also on my laptop and and my main computer. The are completely different systems. A Duron 1600 with 256 Meg, A Pentium 4 2.0 GHz with 512 Meg and a Pentium M 1400 with 256 Meg. All are running XP

It must be in your subtitles and I am stumped.If you open the idx do you see anything particular for that particular timestamp?While waiting for someone more intelligent to answer that, you could convert your subtitles to srt or any other text based format. Subrip is the handiest........since it's episodes, you only have to identify the letters once, and save the character matrix, it wouldn't take that long..
How do you go about extracting the subtitles anyway?
I wonder does it play properly if muxed through mkvmerge to matroska output... (just thinking aloud  )

I'm sure it must be in the subtitles. I never have any problem with .srt and I know it is is fast to convert them. But for one reason or another they are never in sync after the proces. I think I have to read a couple of FAQ's for that  .

I opened the a.idx file in notepad. This one gives a crash at 10:22. I could not see anything strange. So I started cutting pieces of the end until I found the exact line that gave me the crash. I also cropped a part of the beginning to make it smaller. That has no effect. The strange thing is that it will crash at 10:22. But it will not crash if you take out the last line for 11:11:973. It will also not crash if it is the only line that you take out of the complete file. So obviously there it is happening.

Here is the file:

# VobSub index file, v7 (do not modify this line!)
#
# Generated by MPlayer 0.90pre6-2.95.3 (subtitleripper)
# See lt;ucl:gt; for more information about MPlayer
# See lt;ucl:gt; for more information about Vobsub
#
size: 720x576
palette: 101010, 808080, 808080, 808080, 808080, 808080, 808080, ebebeb, 808080,

b0b0b0, 808080, 808080, 808080, 808080, 808080, 808080

# Language index in use
langidx: 0

id: nl, index: 0
timestamp: 00:10:06:293, filepos: 000033000
timestamp: 00:10:12:293, filepos: 000034000
timestamp: 00:10:17:693, filepos: 000034800
timestamp: 00:10:21:893, filepos: 000035800
timestamp: 00:10:26:693, filepos: 000036800
timestamp: 00:10:30:293, filepos: 000037000
timestamp: 00:10:35:693, filepos: 000038000
timestamp: 00:10:38:693, filepos: 000038800
timestamp: 00:10:45:293, filepos: 000039000
timestamp: 00:11:01:773, filepos: 00003a000
timestamp: 00:11:05:373, filepos: 00003a800
timestamp: 00:11:06:573, filepos: 00003b000
timestamp: 00:11:11:373, filepos: 00003c000
timestamp: 00:11:11:973, filepos: 00003c800

hhhmmm forgive my ignorance, but what is that? :

# Generated by MPlayer 0.90pre6-2.95.3 (subtitleripper)

how do you go about getting your vobsub files off the vobs? Does MPlayer do it?

I'm not sure. I do not make these subs. The guy who is doing it is offline for some time. He had a very bad crash with his computer. As far as I know he is running a Linux system so he is doing everything a bit 'different'  
I looked at the movie again, and I do not seem to 'mis' a subtitle when I delete the bad line. And the subtitles after this line are completely in sync. Perhaps it is pointing to a non existent subtitle in the sub file and that creates the crash. It would be a not expected situation for vsfilter. But I guess it should simply skip the subs it cannot handle.
Is there any way to check out if ther are errors in the idx/sub/ifo set?

I see........ well I would expect it to be the cause of the problem.....I have no idea about linux, but making the subtitles with vobsubconfigure in windows has a good chance to solve it I reckon. It must be a slight compatibility problem or something, as for the error checking, my brain is foggy this afternoon ( banged my head 2 days ago  ) and nothing springs to mind immediately

Tell your friend that he's using such an old version of MPlayer that's it's out of the change log  

try to run a search for linux and vobsub, see what you come up with.
Please come back when/if solved

Say, why dont you just try that? open subresync, load the idx, save as.... vobsub file. That might put it right.?

PS: are the out of synch srt made from linux sources as well? Because, straight from a vobsub file, I've never heard of an out of synch srt either  try subrip for it.

Yep, the out of sync srt's are from the same source. I tried the bad subs of course  And I can't sync them using SubtitleWorkshop. The effect is non-lineair.

I tried SubResync but that does not work. It also crashes. That was to be expected of course. It is the same DLL doing al the work. The weekend is over here. So I have to stop experimenting. Thanks for your innput.

Last experiment : try to mux to matroska, using mkvmerge from mkvtoolnix

It's easy to use and you can mux idx directly in. Just see if it works.If it doesn't, no loss hey

Ok, it has taken me some time, this is a new update on my crash problem. I removed vobsub / vsfilter 2.33. I downloaded the new version (2004-08-28)of FFDShow. This version claims to be able to display 'vobsub' subtitles. It worked like a charm. No hickups whatsoever. All the 'crashing points' were handled without a problem. So I guess I do have some problematic subtitle files, but vobsub/vsfilter is not capable of dealing with them and for FFDShow they are no problem.