Easy external subtitles with D-Subtitler

tokyovigilante · Post by **tokyovigilante** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 6:23 am

I've found Handbrake's handling of subtitles (ie burning them into the encoded video) to be suboptimal, as often I have French movies I prefer to watch in Français when I'm alone, but with subtitles for friends.

As such I use D-Subtitler from http://www.objectifmac.com, which is OCR software for VIDEO_TS and VOB folders/files. You just run it over your DVD or image after a Handbrake encode, and it will extract the subtitles to .SRT files. It's a PowerPC binary, but not too taxing to run under Rosetta.

RikPierce · Post by **RikPierce** » Fri Jun 29, 2007 7:32 pm

Yeiks! I would very much like to be able to choose to have subtitles on my iPod, but I'm not a Geek. Please help with the acronyms and such. I know OCR is optical character reader but I can't understand how that would work. What is VIDEO_TS and VOB? And what do I do with a .SRT file? Where do I find this Rosetta to run my files under?

hawkman · Post by **hawkman** » Fri Jun 29, 2007 8:04 pm

RikPierce wrote:I would very much like to be able to choose to have subtitles on my iPod

The only way is to burn them into the picture for the iPod, as handbrake currently can. The iPod does not support anything else.

maubp · Post by **maubp** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 9:54 pm

RikPierce wrote:I know OCR is optical character reader but I can't understand how that would work. What is VIDEO_TS and VOB?

These are terms relating to DVD videos. On DVDs the subtitles are stored as pictures rather than text, so OCR is needed to turn DVD subtitles into text.

stuffer · Post by **stuffer** » Sat Jul 07, 2007 12:38 pm

so what happens when you use d-subtitler and get a .srt file? can you throw it in any video containers? i am looking to add subtitles as a selectable option in the movie property window of quicktime pro. not worried about ipod support

tokyovigilante · Post by **tokyovigilante** » Sun Jul 08, 2007 11:26 am

stuffer wrote:so what happens when you use d-subtitler and get a .srt file? can you throw it in any video containers? i am looking to add subtitles as a selectable option in the movie property window of quicktime pro. not worried about ipod support

I'm not sure, potentially Matroska has some support (that container can do anything

) but basically its a text file which has an index of time points in the video and a subtitle string for each. You pass it to VLC or whatever other player you want manually, I don't know of a player that can automatically extract it from a container.

tokyovigilante · Post by **tokyovigilante** » Sun Jul 08, 2007 11:32 am

RikPierce wrote:Yeiks! I would very much like to be able to choose to have subtitles on my iPod, but I'm not a Geek. Please help with the acronyms and such. I know OCR is optical character reader but I can't understand how that would work. What is VIDEO_TS and VOB? And what do I do with a .SRT file? Where do I find this Rosetta to run my files under?

Hehe sorry, the acronyms are flying thick and fast. A VIDEO_TS folder is the section of a pressed DVD where the video portion is stored. VOB files are within this folder, and contain the MPEG2 (ie DVD video format) video data, usually with audio combined or "muxed" in.

The trouble with subtitles is that they are not stored as text on the DVD, rather as transparent pictures of the words, like a scanned image. What D-Subtitler does is run through these images, and performs OCR, or optical character recognition, to convert the images back to text. It saves the result as a .srt file, which as i've said above is just the subtitles with a time stamp. You can use this file with the Videolan player (VLC) when you load a movie, and it will render the subtitles for you.

Rosetta is the technology built into the Intel versions of Mac OS so that you can run a PowerPC (ie older mac) program on an Intel (newer) mac, without the Developer having to release a new version. It's automatic, and you don't have to worry about it at all.

Long story short, this is just a nice way to have a nice clean movie rip, with subtitles as an optional extra.

D-Subtitler just runs tho

RikPierce · Post by **RikPierce** » Sun Jul 08, 2007 1:26 pm

Terrific, tokyovigilante! I can see why it will be a while before Apple makes an iPod that will have subtitles as a viewer option. Thanks for the explaination.