How to rip subtitles to use in DVDSP

[phoney]

This is nothing new and revolutionary, just a small guide for those who hasn't discovered it themselves. And it's not a 100% mac solution, but that cannot be avoided as some vital apps are win-only.
But there may still be a few good hints, so keep on reading...

Tools needed:
OS X
Virtual PC (sorry)
Subrip (link at bottom)
Osex
DVDSP and subtitle editor
program to convert pc text to mac, e.g. Cyclone X
text editor with grep search and replace, e.g. BBEdit

Besides ripping your dvd once with osex as program or elementary stream, rip it again as program stream (vob file), but this time deselect everything but the subtitles (no video, no audio). You don't have to deselect unwanted subs, the file will be really small anyway, just remember which track number the subtitle you want has, e.g. track 01. You will end up with a vob of about 5MB.

Start Virtual PC and SubRip. Load the vob, and select which language stream you want (remember it's track number?) and click start. No need to change the other settings from their defaults.
(In the subrip readme file it says that you also have to open some .ifo files, and blah blah blah, but I think that is just if you don't know which stream is which laguage.)

Then you will have to help the OCR engine of SubRip with just about every new character until it has encountered them all once. This is actually not as painful as it sounds since it only needs 3-4 subpictures (but there may come some strange chars later, so don't go for lunch).

You can of course work with the main vob file of 5-7GB as well, but then it will be soooo much slower. I also had problems with VPC not recognizing files that large.
My 5MB file took about 5 min to process.

When it's done, save as a Spruce subtitle file, which is almost what Subtitle Editor wants as input.
Convert the file to mac format with Cyclone X or another mac<>pc app. Edit the file in BBedit to make it subtitle editor compatible (add tabs and

tags).

A line in stl format looks like this
00:01:05:11,00:01:09:16,Hallå där|din usling!

and DVDSP SE wants it like this:
00:01:05:11[tab]00:01:09:16[tab]Hallå där

din usling!
(with real tabs instead of [tab])

The BBedit search and replace string should look like this (for the grep challenged ;)
Search for:
(..):(..):(..):(..),(..):(..):(..):(..),
replace with:
\1:\2:\3:\4\t\5:\6:\7:\8\t

And then replace | with



Done.

PS. I had really good results with the "main" subtitle, no ocr errors at all, but for the commentary track, they had used a thin font, so there was tons of ocr errors. YMMV

a SubRip page:
http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/subtitle_tools/subrip.cfm

[Man7]

And if i already have the sub on microDvd format and want to convert to DVDSP format how do i do?Is it possible?

[phoney]

Haven't tested, but it seemed like SubRip works as a converter also