ripping Japanese subtitles

[marukomu]

Hi, I have a DVD with just Japanese subtitles and I have a seperate .srt English subtitle file for the same movie. I've put the subtitles onto the disk but the timing is all over the place.

I was wondering if it is possible to rip the subtitles from this DVD and then load them into something like subtitle workshop and change them to English manually using my other subtitles. This would leave all the timing intact.
If I leave blank spaces for all the Japanese characters when I rip the subtitles, will I be left with an .srt file with just the time and no text?

[kschang]

Well, is the Japanese subtitle in Romanji or Katakana? If it's in Romanji, then you can sorta use that to "align" the English subtitles, but there maybe an easier way.

In Subtitle WOrkshop, there's a special "adjust timing" menu choice where you can set the "first dialog begin" and "last dialog end" timing. The program will then "stretch" all the inbetween subtitle's timing to fit.

If that doesn't work, you can then try my guide:

https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=293487

Which is basically your idea.

[marukomu]

unfortunately, they are in kanji and hiragana, i thought that maybe i could enter gibberish for each character just to get an srt file that I can then change manually.

[kschang]

Hmmm... You could try, but if you can't read it, you can't be sure they will have the same number of lines and all that, so you can't "sync" them, thus the timing you get from it will not be very useful.

Try the first/last sync method first and see how that turns out.

[bidomo]

Hi, I have a DVD with just Japanese subtitles and I have a seperate .srt English subtitle file for the same movie. I've put the subtitles onto the disk but the timing is all over the place.

I was wondering if it is possible to rip the subtitles from this DVD and then load them into something like subtitle workshop and change them to English manually using my other subtitles. This would leave all the timing intact.
If I leave blank spaces for all the Japanese characters when I rip the subtitles, will I be left with an .srt file with just the time and no text?

You can try to Rip with SubRip in a Bitmap based Subtitle Format (like SRT), it will give you the timing of each dialog, so you only have to copy/paste from your Eng Sub...

You can try MS IME and rip every single Kanji/Kana to preserve full text mode, but I can Assure you, its very time comsuming

[marukomu]

thanks everyone. I'm going to experiment a bit next week and I'll tell you how I get on