It's not necessarily the DVDs fault. The fault lies when doing softsub rips where the timing actually gets changed ever so slightly from the DVD content. I ripped The Slayers long ago (I never made it public but did give it away to a few friends). What needs to happen is use one of the guliverkli utilities (I can't remember which one) where you can actually "stretch" out subtitle times, and what you do is use Virtual dub to get the exact time to the millisecond of when you want to see that subtitle being said, then input that value as the "first subtitle time" and then do the same thing for the very last one. I have found that over an entire DVD which was about 7 episodes, it needed to be stretched about 5 seconds, which makes a HUGE difference.
I just remember hearing about other old Pioneer releases (El Hazard maybe) with bad timing that crept into the DVD-rips. I took a look at the first episode of Fushigi Yuugi again, and didn't notice any extremely bad timing, except for a lot of scene bleeds. But that's pretty standard for R1 DVDs. But they do have the silly setup of 6-7 episodes on one DVD title, so I can see how that could cause problems when ripping the subtitles.
And seeing it again reminded me of how much work would have to go into making a truly good DVD-rip of FY. If I had all the time and skill in the world, I would:
* Convert all the subtitles to .ass (not out of any dislike for vobsubs, but for other reasons)
* Translate a bunch of onscreen text and add that to the subtitles - for instance, it would be useful to know that Tamahome has the kanji for "ogre" on his forehead when we
first see him, instead of 3 minutes later when Miaka is thinking back to her encounter.
* Translate the ED song, since it's not subbed on the DVDs. It wouldn't be hard since the kanji lyrics are in the video. At least the OP is translated, though it's hardsubbed.
* Copy/Paste these text and ED translations into a second "Songs/Signs only" subtitle track for the English audio, like most modern DVDs have. That allows dub watchers to understand the text and the ED without having the full subtitles on and without any additional hardsubbing in the encode - the OP, show title, and episode titles are already hardsubbed.
* And after messing around that much with the subtitles, I'd be tempted to edit the main dialogue, but for 52+13 episodes...no. They're pretty standard DVD subs (no honorifics, Western name order), but at least they don't have the embarrassing "hear last name, read first name" syndrome.
