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soft subtitles in mp4 on iPhone?

A

aethelbert

macrumors 601
Original poster
Jun 1, 2007
4,287
0
Chicago, IL, USA
So subtitles have been an advertised feature since 1.1.3. Yet I've never come across a way to get soft subtitles onto the iPhone (or into mp4 for that matter). I've never had subtitles in anything that I've bought from the iTunes store, either. And when I rip DVDs, my only option is to burn subtitles onto the video, making them permanent. IIRC, the iPhone will only play files from the .mp4 container. So is it even possible to extract soft subtitles from a DVD and get them to optionally play through iTunes/iPhone in that format? I'm not looking for something like handbrake where I can have permanent, but I would like the option of having them if it is difficult to hear the audio. If so, how is this done? I've googled and googled and I've come up with absolutely nothing.

Or, it is possible to get .srt subtitles into a .mp4 file to be optional without being permanently burnt onto the video?
 
akonradi said:
So is it even possible to extract soft subtitles from a DVD and get them to optionally play through iTunes/iPhone in that format?
Click to expand...
No, because the subtitles stored on DVDs are not stored as text, but as bitmap images. That means converting them to text requires OCR.

Anyway, converting srt files to the correct format is trivial, so is importing them into an MP4, but getting them to be recognised as subtitles by iPhone/iTunes/Quicktime is not.

There's a patch for Handbrake that allows you to specify a srt file during conversion, and that will apparently allow the subtitles to be recognised by Quicktime. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to work for me.

Search for subtitles in the handbrake forums, you'll find more information there.
 
subtitles or closed captioning?

I just watched a movie on my iPhone which I bought from iTMS that the closed captioning text worked fine.

is CC turned on in the settings?

Settings->iPod->Closed captioning ON/OFF
 
skubish said:
subtitles or closed captioning?

I just watched a movie on my iPhone which I bought from iTMS that the closed captioning text worked fine.

is CC turned on in the settings?

Settings->iPod->Closed captioning ON/OFF
Click to expand...
Subtitles. Only like 20 movies from iTunes even have closed captioning, anyway. There's a difference between the two.
 
skubish said:
subtitles or closed captioning?

I just watched a movie on my iPhone which I bought from iTMS that the closed captioning text worked fine.

is CC turned on in the settings?

Settings->iPod->Closed captioning ON/OFF
Click to expand...
CC aren't subtitles. I might want to store subtitles in Romanian, French and English in my MP4s, CC don't allow me to do that. Besides CCs are for the hearing impaired, whilst subtitles are used for foreign language films.
 
Subler does exactly what you want, free software for OSX here:

http://code.google.com/p/subler/

Also, I realize this post is years old, but it comes up as a top hit in google so I hope that this reference helps someone quickly find an answer in the future
 
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