Blu-Rays subtitles

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Almost half a year later, has anyone come up with a better way to do it?

[mic j]

Originally Posted by T'hain Esh Kelch

Almost half a year later, has anyone come up with a better way to do it?

Subler (v0.19) now supports PGS OCR. That's all that's changed that I am aware of. Have not used it, but in theory is simplifies the process.

[bluewooster]

Just tried two bluray MKV rips with PGS subtitles and both came out looking great with Subler (OCR). This is great news! I still have several movies that I never found a suitable srt online for.

[mic j]

Originally Posted by bluewooster

Just tried two bluray MKV rips with PGS subtitles and both came out looking great with Subler (OCR). This is great news! I still have several movies that I never found a suitable srt online for.

How was the accuracy of the conversion? Last time I did an OCR (VOBSUB) with Subler it took me over an hour to correct the errors.

[bluewooster]

I haven't seen any errors so far but will try some more MKV rips. Previously I would only get files with zero bytes or unintelligible output!

[mic j]

Originally Posted by bluewooster

I haven't seen any errors so far but will try some more MKV rips. Previously I would only get files with zero bytes or unintelligible output!

Look for /, 1, l substitution errors in particular. Those were the majority of errors I found when doing Subler OCR with VOBSUB's in the past.

[RedTomato]

Big thanks for the subtitling advice. Delay shifting for me is fine - I can do it in VLC or MPlayerX on the fly anyway.

What I'm having a harder time with is adjusting the frame-rate. Can you advise on the best way to do this in OSX?

Eg: my text subtitle file is 29.97fps but my movie file is 25fps. (quite a common situation as my DVDs are UK hence 25fps PAL, but many subtitle files are US 29.97 NTSC)

That's a difference of 5 frames every second, or a second out every 5 or 6 seconds. By the end of a film, that's more than 10 minutes out

If you could let me know how to do this adjustment, either on the fly in VLC / MplayerX or using a third party tool in OSX, please do.

Thanks.

[mic j]

Originally Posted by RedTomato

Big thanks for the subtitling advice. Delay shifting for me is fine - I can do it in VLC or MPlayerX on the fly anyway.

What I'm having a harder time with is adjusting the frame-rate. Can you advise on the best way to do this in OSX?

Eg: my text subtitle file is 29.97fps but my movie file is 25fps. (quite a common situation as my DVDs are UK hence 25fps PAL, but many subtitle files are US 29.97 NTSC)

That's a difference of 5 frames every second, or a second out every 5 or 6 seconds. By the end of a film, that's more than 10 minutes out

If you could let me know how to do this adjustment, either on the fly in VLC / MplayerX or using a third party tool in OSX, please do.

Thanks.

I know of know way to make the adjustments you are talking about. I do know that if you are using download subs, they are often marked with origin. So you might look for subs based on UK sources which should come from the different framerate. Other than that....I am useless.

Of course, you could always create your own subs using Subler on OSX. Lots of editing of errors though.

[bluewooster]

I've done a couple more OCR's of PGS subs using Subler and have only noticed one error so far! (Sefor for señor but I think it was the tilde above the n that caused trouble). I'm very impressed. This was the last troublesome area for me with conversion of my media to ATV. I say this every couple months and never follow through but I'm definitely sending this guy some cash - Subler is amazing!

[mic j]

Originally Posted by bluewooster

I've done a couple more OCR's of PGS subs using Subler and have only noticed one error so far! (Sefor for señor but I think it was the tilde above the n that caused trouble). I'm very impressed. This was the last troublesome area for me with conversion of my media to ATV. I say this every couple months and never follow through but I'm definitely sending this guy some cash - Subler is amazing!

WOW! I'm impressed with that error rate. Will have to give it a go, myself. And I agree with you about financial support.

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

How do you actually use the OCR feature in Subler? I can't find any option to actually do it.. O_o

[mic j]

Originally Posted by T'hain Esh Kelch

How do you actually use the OCR feature in Subler? I can't find any option to actually do it.. O_o

I posted detailed instructions somewhere in this forum. Look up posts by me and of course, you can Google "Subler" to find it's website and their are instructions there, or a very good source of ripping in general and specifically Subler, Menneisyys2 (look his posts up in this forum) has an excellent website with tutorials.

[bluewooster]

T'hain Esh Kelch,

I used the excellent write-up by mic j to learn how to OCR but will summarize it for you:

1. Start Subler
2. Click on File and select New
3. Click on File and select Import File to select your MKV that has subtitles (alternatively, you can drag and drop the file onto your "new" project)
*Please note that you cannot simply "open" the file using Subler - i.e. you need to start a "New" project and then import the MKV (I screwed this up initially)
4. Deselect everything except the subtitle you wish to convert (under Action it should list 3GPP text - as in convert to 3GPP text)
5. You can actually add subtitles from other projects at this point if you want to convert a bunch at once
6. Now, add the project to your queue and start the queue
7. It will produce an MPG-4 file that consists of only subtitles
8. Open this file with Subler
9. Click on the subtitle track and then File and Export to save it as an SRT file
10. Please note that if you do have several converted subtitles in this file, you need to click on each individually and export each one (and it will keep defaulting to the same name so you need to manually change this when you save it)

This is by memory so sorry if there is a mistake in there somewhere and mic j wrote it out first (and better!) so you could search that post. It looks bad when typed out but is really pretty slick once you've done a couple.

I have to say - now that I've done a few more PGS conversions, the error rate is probably higher than I originally thought. I'm noticing more mistakes but still haven't seen something actually illegible or distracting.

[jamesdmc]

As a new Apple TV owner, my movie library is now inside iTunes. Subtitles, as we all know, have to be .srt. My current process from Blu Ray to Apple TV is:
1. Use MakeMKV to rip the main title to mkv (~45 minutes)
2. Use MKVtools to extract the .sup subtitle(s) (~3-5 minutes)
3. Import the .sup into Subtitle Edit - it runs perfectly fine in VMware Fusion in unity view - and OCR them / correct them.(~30 minutes; as the dictionary grows, the processing time gets shorter)
4. Import the original mkv rip from Step 1 into Handbrake, add the .srt subtitles from Step 3, and encode using the Apple TV 3 preset. (encoding time approximately equals the movie's running time on 2008 8-core Mac Pro)
5. Import the finished m4v into iFlicks, which tags it and adds it to the iTunes library. (~2-5 minutes)


I briefly tested the OCR capabilities of subler for the first time last night. I was impressed with its speed, but the resulting .srt had mistakes that needed correcting. This does not surprise me; I wasn't expecting it be perfect.

Additionally, I've noticed that sometimes the only English subtitle track available contains descriptive subtitles like [SCREAMING] or [DOOR OPENING] as well as dialog subtitles. I haven't had time to play with Jubler. Can Jubler remove all text between [] or () all at once like Subtitle Edit can?

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Thank you guys, I got it to work! Not very intuitive though.. But now I have my subtitles showing up fine in Quicktime. Plex is still a problem, but that is apparently fixed in the next release, so everything is good!

[mic j]

Originally Posted by jamesdmc

As a new Apple TV owner, my movie library is now inside iTunes. Subtitles, as we all know, have to be .srt. My current process from Blu Ray to Apple TV is:
1. Use MakeMKV to rip the main title to mkv (~45 minutes)
2. Use MKVtools to extract the .sup subtitle(s) (~3-5 minutes)
3. Import the .sup into Subtitle Edit - it runs perfectly fine in VMware Fusion in unity view - and OCR them / correct them.(~30 minutes; as the dictionary grows, the processing time gets shorter)
4. Import the original mkv rip from Step 1 into Handbrake, add the .srt subtitles from Step 3, and encode using the Apple TV 3 preset. (encoding time approximately equals the movie's running time on 2008 8-core Mac Pro)
5. Import the finished m4v into iFlicks, which tags it and adds it to the iTunes library. (~2-5 minutes)


I briefly tested the OCR capabilities of subler for the first time last night. I was impressed with its speed, but the resulting .srt had mistakes that needed correcting. This does not surprise me; I wasn't expecting it be perfect.

Additionally, I've noticed that sometimes the only English subtitle track available contains descriptive subtitles like [SCREAMING] or [DOOR OPENING] as well as dialog subtitles. I haven't had time to play with Jubler. Can Jubler remove all text between [] or () all at once like Subtitle Edit can?

Juble can be used to edit those items out, PITA though. Those usually occur in CC tracks but can be in others as well. You might want to check if there are multiple subtitle tracks.

[rayward]

Originally Posted by jamesdmc

As a new Apple TV owner, my movie library is now inside iTunes. Subtitles, as we all know, have to be .srt.

Subtitles do not have to be .srt if you're dealing with just forced (non-English) subs. For the most part, Handbrake will pick these up from your Blu Ray rip, assuming that you included all the English subtitle tracks when you ripped the movie. You can have Handbrake search for forced subs by selecting the option on the Subtitle tab.

Rarely (now), Handbrake will miss some forced subs tracks (if they fall outside its parameters). In that case, you can still burn in forced subs using the old workflow. What's nice about this is that it uses the intended font, which can be important for certain movies.

Of course, if you want full subtitles, that can be turned on and off, .srt is the only way to go. For the most part, you can download .srt files from the interwebs for free (just search moviename & srt), thus avoiding the need to go through a tedious workflow.

If you want full subs, burned in, you can use the workflow I linked above, and just substitute the full subtitle track for the forced only track.