Adding subtitles….

Tuesday, 16 June, 2015

Harking back to my earlier posts on transcoding DVDs for viewing on a Pico Projector, I have recently been trying to make sure (for one film) that subtitles transferred across. This proved to be both more complicated to sort out and relatively simple (in the end!) to achieve. Subtitles (as opposed to closed captions) on DVDs are (perhaps strangely!) images that are stored as a separate stream within the video file and when activated are overlaid on top (with transparency applied) of the video stream. In order to transcode these you actually need to extract the subtitle stream, use optical character recognition (OCR) to convert them to text and then enable subtitles on your encoding software to add them back in again. Quite a few steps… which was why it took a little why to fathom out.

DVDSubEdit was used to read the subtitles (subpic stream as its known) - load the file, clock “Run OCR” and then “Save as .srt”. For some strange reason (possibly linked to 4:3 and 16:9 subtitles mixed together) all the lines were duplicated which would mean they would appear twice…. so Subtitle Edit was used to remove these duplicate lines (Tools -> Merge lines with same text). Make sure the SRT file has the same name as the VOB file extracted from the DVD and is in the same directory…. in TEncode then simply select “Enable subtitles” (making sure the Mencoder encoder is being used) and then encode!!

The subtitling works well, although bear in mind that the OCR may not always be perfect.

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