...hard encoding the only solution? I burned an an avi movie onto a blank dvd and added a subtitle with the same file name as the avi movie but with extension .srt. I loaded it on my Sony dvd player that supports divx but divx data error message appeared. That should answer my question but maybe there is something that can be done or maybe I'm doing something wrong somewhere along the process.

This trick normally works when watching the film on the computer using vlc, windows media player, etc. Is hard encoding the only solution? I emailed Sony but got no response. If you could come up with possible solutions, I would greatly appreciate it.