* * *
This article is Rated: EVERYONE
Hey ! There's no need to get all bent out of shape just because the subtitles on your DVD always appear on top of the video, or are too lightly colored so you can't read them.
They were designed this way, quite simply, because they are two-colored pixeled IMAGES, and not actual text, and the player can only place them where your video appears.
But wouldn't it be great to get around this somehow, maybe to even changing those images to ANY Windows font you want, with any proportion, any color, any shadowing, and at any scale or size ?
Well, now you can !
As long as the DVD you provide has graphic subtitles, which are called VOBSubs, you can indeed and quite easily convert them to SRTs.
So just what is an SRT file anyways ?
It is a RAW computer text file that anyone can easily edit in NOTEPAD, and using a media player such as Media Player Classic (link provided below), you can play your movie using this text file as a substitute for the regular graphic subtitles.
There are a great many advantages to doing this. The least of which is, if your video is widescreen, you can place the subtitles RIGHT beneath your video, right into the black area so it doesn't interfere with the main movie.
If your video, however, is 4x3 and fills the full screen, this is still not a problem. You can select the size and thickness of the outline and color of the SRT, usually black, to appear around your subtitles and make them stand out.
While of course you can choose a color and font for your subtitles, it is suggested you use Tahoma BOLD and white for your typeface.
Now this tutorial makes the assumption you have already used a DVD ripping utility such as DVDFAB to copy the DVD which contains the subtitles in question to your hard-drive under a directory of your choosing.
You can't read directly from the DVD drive to build your SRT so don't even try.
When you've copied the DVD to your hard-drive, inside the directory it will look like this:
While the AUDIO_TS directory is empty, your VIDEO_TS is full of files.
What you want to do is bring up that directory in Windows Explorer. Click on VIEW, choose the last option, DETAILS.
Now look at the files listed. You want to find the ones that are clustered with the most 1,048,574 KB shown.
Step up from there looking at the filenames. Usually you will stop at VTS_01_1, but it might be different on your DVD. This is your movie file. You can only store 1,048,574 KB per file on a DVD so it has several of them to 'carry' the whole movie.
Go up 2 from there and you have the filename, VTS_01_0.IFO or whichever one that you can see carries the brunt of the video. Remember this as you will need it later. Keep the File Explorer open if you like or if you are certain you can remember the filename, close it now.
Once you've met this task and transferred a DVD to your hard-drive and determined where the main movie is, you can continue. If you haven't done this yet, go to do so now - I'll wait for you ...
Ready to continue ? Ok, now from here download the utility called, "Subtitle Edit."
You can find the latest version HERE:
[LINK]
Go ahead and install that and run it.
Now select FILE, and IMPORT/OCR SUBTITLE VOB/IFO (DVD).
Click on the [...] to the right of IFO FILE. Go inside the VIDEO_TS of your backed up DVD.
Do you recall the file I told you to remember above ? Was it VTS_01_0.IFO ? If so, select that, or whichever one it was that had the cluster of megabyte files.
Select OPEN. That file will be scanned and appearing inside the VOB FILES area will be a list of all the included VOB files that contain the graphic subtitles you want to rip. Click START RIPPING.
This might take a moment.
Now wait just a minute. Your computer will be busy deciphering all the graphic subtitles from your DVD.
A new notice will appear. Choose language. The image on the right certainly does seem to appear in English, so click the OK to confirm.
Right, now you have a busy screen. I want to pause for a minute. Years ago I had a program that would scan every individual 'piece' of a graphic subtitle and ask me what letter or set of letters it was. And it would usually take me an hour or two to manually define all the subtitle pieces - it was very tedious work for me. I can definitely recall this ...
It was years ago, and I did it for Carlos. I purchased a German video he was interested in. In it the audio was German and had VOBSub German subtitles - but no English subtitles at all.
He innocently asked me if there was any way I could change the German text to English.
I said I think so, but it would definitely not be an easy task. At the time I thought DVD subtitles were text and I merely had to inject in English over the German.
He said, don't worry about it then. I said no, let me do this because I can use the practice and there's a good chance I might need to know this knowledge later. So I did set out to do it.
The first thing I did was to extract the DVD to the hard-drive. DVDFAB was up for it at the time. Then I ran a program to rip out the graphic VOB subtitles.
I had high hopes that it wouldn't be so difficult, but then I learned for the first time that DVD subtitles were actually graphic images, and not real text ! Oh who the HECK decided to do that !?
So then I found a utility that would 'scan' the graphics from a DVD's subtitles and give you a chance to type out what letter or letters each separate section contained, and it was usually one or two letters - I had to tell the program what each of them were were by typing them out.
And I had to do it in GERMAN !
This took hours of tedium ! And what's worse, if I made ANY error at all, I had to START ALL OVER AGAIN from the beginning as there was no option to backtrack in the software !
OMG what a total nightmare that was ! I actually remember doing it =3= times till I got it right all the way through !
Many days and hours later when I was done with that tedious bit, I had created a text file that was comprised entirely of the German language with time signatures where they matched in the movie.
Then I wrote a program in GFA to do a batch process on each line to crop out the time signature and leave only the German text.
There I brought up Google Translate and pasted the lot from the text file and told it to translate from German to English. Then I copied that NEW text to the clipboard and notepad as a new text file.
Then I wrote a counter-program to inject back in the time signatures to the new English translation based on counting the blank lines between as a reference point.
Then I converted the DVD movie itself to a single large XviD AVI file, about 4000kbps. Then using an additional utility in VirtualDUB, I hard-coded (that is wrote directly on the image) the new subtitle file which contained the English translation from Google - matching the exact time frames where the other German subtitles were to appear.
From there I took the new .AVI and authored a custom DVD for him using the finished and new movie file. Phew ! Yes it took a WEEK of very hard work to do this, and it was a gift to him for Christmas, and perhaps a good bit of education for me as well.
OMG that was so much work though !
Well, I have some good news for you, mate. Today's software is quite a bit smarter than it ever was years ago, so included in Subtitle Edit is a marvelous tool that I never had the blessing to access called the "OCR Reader."
This incredible utility will graphically read the subtitles THEMSELVES and convert them to text based upon interpreting the pixeled letter formations. Wow ! That woulda saved me some serious hours years ago !
Now, this is not a very speedy process. On my quad-pentium it takes some time.
On your computer, it might even take longer. But consider what it is doing - I believe that would just stagger the imagination of any computer programmer. Yessir !
When ready, click on START OCR.
Let it run for a-while, watch it if you like or go do something else. Finally it will finish. Click OK and it will return back to the main menu with the converted subtitles.
Okay, now you have your subtitles and they are a true TEXT file. But you shouldn't stop just yet.
Notwithstanding your subtitles are entirely in uppercase letters or not, you should select from the menu, TOOLS, CHANGE CASING.
If your subtitles are all CAPS, this will fix that, but you should select it anyways as some subtitles, even though they are part of the DVD, can be badly written and have a lowercase letter starting a new sentence, and many other instances of not capitalizing or lowercasing when it is correct to do so.
You should choose NORMAL CASING, and checkmark FIX NAMES CASING. Nothing else should be selected, press OK.
Notice how intelligent this bugger is ! It already has words in its dictionary that tells it what words should be capitalized. Click OK.
And you are back. Now select from the menu, TOOLS, FIX COMMON ERRORS.
From here there are MANY options to choose from. I will tell you right now, I do not use all of these. If you disable or checkmark one of them, be certain it is something you are going to want or not need as you might forget about it later.
When ready, click NEXT>
Then click at the top, APPLY SELECTED FIXES.
This is a pretty fast process and should be done. Now click OK, and you are back.
Check the FORMAT which appears in the center just below the top menu. Ensure it is set to SubRip (.srt).
If it's not, change it now.
Alright ! You are DONE ! Click FILE, SAVE, be certain you are directly inside the VIDEO_TS directory and save off these subtitles as filename, "sub" Click SAVE. You can exit Subtitle Edit now or leave it up if you want to experiment with it and the same subtitles later.
Now while you might be able to use any number of media players to view your subtitles, including Windows Media Player, IMHO Media Player Classic tops them all, especially for control over your custom subtitles.
You can download that HERE:
[LINK]
Once downloaded, go ahead and run it. To load your DVD, select FILE, QUICK OPEN FILE, select the first or next-to-first file in the DVD directory called, "VIDEO_TS.IFO."
Let that run for a second, or if you are impatient and want to skip the copyrights and previews and stuff, select NAVIGATE ROOT. If there is an opening animation for the menu you also don't want to wait for, select NAVIGATE ROOT AGAIN and the menu will pop into appearance and be ready for you.
Select PLAY from the DVD menu on the screen. Keep an eye on the information bar below. Just to the left of the double-speakers you will see the length of the video. When the time of it is an hour or more, that means your movie is now playing, and it's time to inject your custom subtitles !
Select FILE, LOAD SUBTITLE...
There should be only one file showing, SUBS.SRT. Select that and OPEN.
Now for customization ! Hit SPACE to pause the film and select VIEW, OPTIONS.
Look to the left for SUBTITLES. If you don't see it open, click on it to reveal, DEFAULT STYLE, and MISC. Click on DEFAULT STYLE.
Here's where the magic comes in !
Choose any font you want. I choose Tahoma BOLD for maximum visibility, but you can have any font you want. You can change the SCALE X% and Y% to 100 for a good legible size.
For SCREEN ALIGNMENT, as I usually play
the video from the computer on a big screen TV, I have found BOTTOM of 0
(zero) works quite well to keep the video separate from the subtitles.
Your colors are already set. I would leave them where they are. Change SHADOW WIDTH to 4 and SHADOW to 4 for a nice outline for even the brightest image frames, and it will only appear if you play a 4x3 video as we have already told the player we want the subtitles to appear at the absolute bottom of the screen.
Ensure BORDER STYLE is set to OUTLINE, UNCHECK POSITION SUBTITLES RELATIVE TO THE VIDEO FRAME, and you are all set. Click APPLY to lock these settings in permanently, and OK.
Now you are back to your video which is still paused. select PLAY, SUBTITLES, UNCHECK ENABLE DVD SUBTITLES, CHECK SUBTITLES (below), and you should see "sub.srt" with a little • in front of it. That ought to do it !
Press SPACE to continue your video and ALT-ENTER to go full-screen with it. Use the UP and DOWN arrow keys to control volume, and - grab some popcorn and enjoy the movie with fresh subtitles you can actually read !
Got any questions ? Lemme know in the comments.
Return back HOME
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Subscribe
Flag Writing
