indie boi, just found a simple piece of software that will do what we want.
http://www.vso-software.fr/divxtodvd/divxtodvd2.htm no bells or whistles, and definitely not a powerful dvd authoring tool. it does the job that we want though - takes pretty much any video file in a popular format and burns it as dvd-video, with an option for subtitles. the subs should be in SRT format though. if you have IDX/SUB subs, you have to use vobsub and do a subresync. you'll have to "teach" it to recognize the text (just type whatever is displayed), and it'll learn pretty quickly.
i don't think the VSO software supports menus and all the fancy dvd things, but if you just wanted to make a disc with subtitles to play in any dvd player, this will do the trick.
if anybody else has better suggestions, we're all ears
