Subtitle Difficulties

[derUbermensch]

I have a .ssa english subtitles file to a Japanese film. When I play them together in VLC, it's fine. But when I load the .ssa file in FFMPEG, and preview the filters, I see Japanese subtitles! I even took out the .ssa file and previewed, and I still got Japanese subtitles! Any solutions?

[derUbermensch]

Also, alone, the video file doesn't play Japanese subtittles. Only when I preview in the Filters tab (with or without a .ssa file) do I get Japanese subtitles suddenly!

[major]

Switch to the previous binaries for japanese subtitles.
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mplayerosx/ffmpegXbinaries230105.zip?download

[hardkraft]

I had a similar problem and it drove me crazy. This was my situation: I had a movie file, English srt subtitles and a sub/idx pair of Chinese subs. Now, no matter what what options I picked form the filters menu it would always play the Chinese subs and it wouldn't burn them either. The problem is that the sub/idx always take precedence over any other sub file and are displayed automatically in the player (I guess it's a feature) The player knows what the subs are because they have the same file name as the movie file, so if you change the movie file name so it doesn't match the hard subs any more that solves that problem. In my case it didn't sove all my problems. Some how it still didn't recognize my srt file. It turned out that the problem was with the folder name where all the files were residing (usually I don't have this problem dots and spaces work fine). After renaming the folder everything worked fine.

The question to Major is how come the sub/idx files don't work? It would seem that if they can be displayed the video output streem could be somehow enconded.

[major]

mencoder just don't support their encoding, possibly this will be fixed in future builds.

[CGuy]

Excuse me while I try to clarify this issue in my mind. I also have a DiVX file with an english VobSub (.sub/.idx) pair. I can play the original file in mplayer and in VLC displaying the subtitles. I would like to convert this to a DVD, with selectable subtitles, but as a last resort I would accept burning them into the movie. I tried to get selectable subtitles during both the original conversion to MPEG-2, and also as a separate authoring attempt. Neither attempt worked.

Is there NO way to do this under OS X currently?

If I end up trying to convert the VobSub format on a peecee, what format should I try to convert it to?

Thanks, CGuy

[major]

Unfortunately, there is no known method to convert or to burn .sub/.idx subtitles on OSX, and you can only use them for playback. If you find a method on PC, convert them to SRT.

[hardkraft]

Unfortunately, I couldn't even find a solution to do it on PC. Idx file keeps track of the timing and the .sub file holds the bitmap data of the subtitles, the actual pixels that need to be displayed. To convert them you would need to have some sort of character recognition. I couldn't find any tools that had it, that is except for ffmpegx of course that does it to convert DVD subs. I wonder if this engine could be coopted to convert idx/sub. Seems a waste though since idx/sub usually look much better than what you get through srt.

[CGuy]

Anyone want a REALLY kludgy (and pricey) way to do it? Not sure if this WILL work as I didn't need the subtitles badly enough to spend the time
trying it.

This is ONLY if you REALLY need the subtitles from a idx/sub pair....

1) View the movie with subtitles displayed (the one thing you CAN do)

2) Use Snapz Pro X (current version 2.0.2, $69) to capture the movie into
a quicktime file

3) Use the extract subtitle function under the Filters tab in ffmpegx to
capture the subtitles from the resulting quicktime movie

4) Burn the subtitles into the movie or use selectable subtitles feature
when encoding the movie into a new format

If anyone tries this and it works, please let me know!

CGuy

[hardkraft]

I believe ffmpeg captures only hard DVD subs that reside in a separate file (similar to idx/sub). I you try to do what you proposed then you have subs burned into a QT file and that's what you wanted to acomplish in the first place so no need for any extra steps. If you really need soft subs there is a good chance you can find them on http://www.extratitles.to/