UTF-8 subtitles

[BobAchgill]

I have .srt files in UTF-8 with Chinese text and would like to burn the subtitles into an avi video...

What is a way to do this?

I am familiar with VirtualDub, but have not been successful to get any solution to work. So I am open to any free means do this.

Thanks!
Bob

[Baldrick]

I would try xvid4psp 5.

[videobruger]

I tried MediaCoder with a traditional chinese srt tranlated from english by Google in SubtitleEdit. You'll need to set Source under Video tab to Avisynth - default would be Mencoder which doesn't do the job.

[jman98]

Xvid4PSP is by far the easiest way to do this. I have personally burned in simplified Chinese subtitles using UTF-8 SRT sources and produced Xvid output with the subtitles being hardcoded into the video. I did this a few times for a friend who speaks Cantonese as a first language. You may need a guide for Xvid4PSP as it's not the most user intuitive program out there, but it's not difficult to do once you understand how the software works.

[BobAchgill]

There does not seem to be any control on how the subtitles look with the Xvid4PSP tool. Or is that a function of the subtitle editor?

[El Heggunte]

FWIW --- VSFilter should work correctly with proper UTF-8 .SRTs
(by "proper", I mean UTF-8 text with the —so-called— Byte-Order Mark at the beginning).

However, if you want to fully-control the colors, font-face, font-size, font-style and positioning of the subtitles,
you must convert the SRT file to UTF-16 .SSA or .ASS.
Both VSFilter and xy-VSFilter work fine with recent versions of VirtualDub.

[BobAchgill]

When I use the current version of VirtualDub and choose filter TextSub 2.23 and try to select my srt file saved as UTF-8 with Chinese text it does not want to accept having selected the file. I tried changing out the VSFilter with the supposedly more current one from Aegisub but it did not seem to make a difference... as in it is like VirtualDub is finding another version of VSFilter somewhere else and not using the local one in the Plugins dir.

I don't know how to check if my file has the correct marker. I am using Notepad and saving as UTF-8. Please see attached sample.

[El Heggunte]

Thanks for the sample file Indeed, it contains the UTF-8 BOM at the beginning.
The actual problem in this case, is both the SRT format itself and some design flaw in VSFilter (regardless of the version number).

After configuring TextSub to use a Chinese "codepage" (not ANSI nor DEFAULT),
you should see something better than blank rectangles in the output pane

Notes:

--- TextSub 2.23 is terribly outdated

--- Yes, SSA or ASS + UTF-16 is the way to go, no need to worry about the codepage hell anymore.

[BobAchgill]

Now how did you do that?! When I go into Virtualdub 1.10.4 and choose the filter Textsub 2.23 and try to open that srt and change the Character set to CHINESEBIG5 and select open... it won't open the srt. Or are you choosing another filter other than Textsub 2.23 or another character set??

If I go to convert the SRT file to UTF-16 .SSA or .ASS.... how do I do the convert AND which filter do I use in VirtualDub to load the SSA or ASS file??

[El Heggunte]

Of course I don't use TextSub 2.23 --- I use a (renamed) xy-VSFilter.dll (extracted from a recent CCCP installer, BTW).

After configuring TextSub to use a Chinese "codepage" (not ANSI nor DEFAULT),
you should see something better than blank rectangles in the output pane

In the self-quote above, by TextSub I mean the filter name inside VirtualDub's applet,
NOT the outdated DLL which contains the same filters as the recent (xy-)VSFilter DLLs

Anyway, and I don't think this should matter, I load VSFilter.vdf manually, because
having too many files in the plugins folder MAY cause problems

If I go to convert the SRT file to UTF-16 .SSA or .ASS.... how do I do the convert AND which filter do I use in VirtualDub to load the SSA or ASS file??

Aegisub should be able to open a SRT and convert it to ASS --- but I don't know for sure, since I don't use it.
You can try other programs as well, such as Subtitle Edit. Me, I like to complicate things whenever I can , so
I convert to SSA with Subtitle Workshop 2.51, and then I edit the new file with EditPlus.

And as I tried to say before, VSFilter.vdf (just rename the DLL) deals with SRT, SSA, ASS, and IDX+SUB.

[BobAchgill]

El Heggunte,

Thanks! The "Load..." to manual load of VSFilter did the trick.

Bob

[El Heggunte]

\o/