How to make subtitles? (e.g. for another language)

General questions or discussion about HandBrake, Video and/or audio transcoding, trends etc.
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dvdcollector
Posts: 18
Joined: Sat Feb 29, 2020 5:15 pm

How to make subtitles? (e.g. for another language)

Post by dvdcollector »

Description of problem or question:
Given you have a e.g. mp4 or mkv file with video/audio, but no available subtitles within the video itself:
What are good ways to make subtitles that ultimately end up either in the container file, or baked-in?
So for baking-in subtitles that are in the source material already, I think in Handbrake it is as easy as ticking a checkbox, right?

But how do I get there without subtitles in the source material?
With video files floating around on the net, it seems to be customary to have ".srt" files in the same folder as the video.
Is an srt file a good way to meld together a video and subtitles in Handbrake, or is there another way to add those from an extra source, other than the video source material?

*If* srt is a good way: I have seen you can make them by hand, but that's slightly tedious and one could mess it up...
Are there recommendable tools (for Windows, or Linux if better) that aide in creating them?

Is there free software to auto-generate a subtitle file from audio, for, say, English, that one could use as a base to translate to other Language (but with the correct times already set etc...)?
Woodstock
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Re: How to make subtitles? (e.g. for another language)

Post by Woodstock »

SRT is not a particularly good way, but it is simple. A better format would be "Substation Alpha" format, often see as either "SSA" or "ASS" files. The better translators seem to use SSA.

Converting audio to subtitles... is not simple. You need a tool that does speech recognition AND translation, with the second part made more difficult by the inaccuracy of the first part. It isn't impossible. But if you're just looking for transcription in the original language to then manually translate, you'll probably have better luck.
dvdcollector
Posts: 18
Joined: Sat Feb 29, 2020 5:15 pm

Re: How to make subtitles? (e.g. for another language)

Post by dvdcollector »

Thanks, I found a free Java based tool "Jubler" for manually making subtitles, and it supports the .ass files, so I'll be using that then.
https://www.jubler.org/screenshots.html

I have found a potential free way of audio to text conversion, but it's still some work, so ATM I'll forego it.
But it is interesting: There is a Mozilla DeepSpeech repo on github, and there seem to be trained models available. But in an article I read, this software does not deal well with pauses in audio. So the article has some python snippets to extract audio out of a vid, detect pauses and make single little audio clips (without silence in them) out of it, to then process them with DeepSpeech, one by one.
https://towardsdatascience.com/generati ... 2c633936a7
But one would need to put things back together again as text, and put the pauses back in, and the text does not have punctuation etc - that was left for homework ;)
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