how does ATV handle subtitles ?

[Tech198]

In regards to ripping your own movies with subtitles to be played back on Apple TV, does it have to be "burned in" to be available, or can it be a separate track ?

aka... I've had a few Asian movies, DVD ripped fine, but other times i needed explicitly select "English" under "Subtitles" tab in order to make this included.

What .SRT/.SSA ? Can Apple TV handle these or not ?


Cheers.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

"Burned-in" is certainty. However, it does well with SRTs too.

 

[Tech198]

ok thanks.

 

[priitv8]

Burned in subs are in the frame forever. So they are no-brainer.
Apple TV supports only 3GPP Text subs. There are tools that will mux subs into mp4 movie for later enjoyment on Apple TV.
The ones like Handbrake and Subler are some of the examples.

 

[Menneisyys2]

What .SRT/.SSA ? Can Apple TV handle these or not ?

Directly, nope, and, if the subs are animated (like in karaokes; see for example the test MKV at http://www.auby.no/files/video_test..._vorbis_styled_and_unstyled_subs_suzumiya.mkv ), then, you won't be able to convert them into static, unstyled, plain (Apple TV-compliant) Tx3g either. In these cases, you can only burn them into the video stream.

NOTE: there are some dynamic SSA -> Tx3g converters for iOS (if you want to drive your ATV from your iDevcice); for example, that of Infuse. I've published quite a lot of info on it in the Infuse thread here. Of course it won't handle advanced SSA animation either. If, however, your SSA subtitle track is (mostly) unstyled (as are those of many Japanese anime), then, you can give it a try as it does runtime(!) SSA -> Tx3g conversion, meaning you won't need to pre-process the movies you want to play back.

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Burned in subs are in the frame forever. So they are no-brainer.
Apple TV supports only 3GPP Text subs. There are tools that will mux subs into mp4 movie for later enjoyment on Apple TV.
The ones like Handbrake and Subler are some of the examples.

Just keep in mind that don't include VobSub bitmap subtracks (along with Apple TV-compliant 3GPP tracks) in those m4v files to keep the original VobSub bitmaps in the same file as the audio/video/3GPP track. While the desktop iTunes can render the 3GPP tracks of these files, the AppleTV (and the stock Videos app on iOS) can't.

 

[priitv8]

Just keep in mind that don't include VobSub bitmap subtracks (along with Apple TV-compliant 3GPP tracks) in those m4v files to keep the original VobSub bitmaps in the same file as the audio/video/3GPP track.

The good news is, that Subler can convert (aka OCR) both DVD and BluRay bitmapped subtitles to text (soft) subtitles into the m4v file. So I see no need to keep those bitmapped subs muxed into MP4 file at all.
Indeed, Subler will need some help for recognising languages other than English. So you need to download the appropriate tessdata language packs.

 

[Menneisyys2]

The good news is, that Subler can convert (aka OCR) both DVD and BluRay bitmapped subtitles to text (soft) subtitles into the m4v file. So I see no need to keep those bitmapped subs muxed into MP4 file at all.
Indeed, Subler will need some help for recognising languages other than English. So you need to download the appropriate tessdata language packs.

Yup - OCR may be OK if you don't mind the OCR errors, which, sometimes, can render entire sentences unintelligible, particularly ones in italic.

More than a year ago, in my posts here at MR (see https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/15960792/ – it has the OCR results of the then-current Subler at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u...(1)-017 - VobSub subs-default OCR Subler.mp4 ), I've very thoroughly examined the OCR capabilities of Subler. For the tests, I used this input file (with VobSub bitmap subs): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u...erSubs/City Of God (1)-017 - VobSub subs.mkv

Now I've re-run the OCR test with the now-current Subler (v0.25). It produced almost exactly the same, totally messed-up results with italic text. (Non-italic text was, for most of the time, recognized OK.) That is, there doesn't seem to be any improvements WRT OCR accuracy.

That is, one shouldn't rely on Subler's OCR – not even in English. (I bet it'd be even worse in, say, Finnish.)

 

[priitv8]

True, I always spell-check the subs after conversion. But in my experience the conversion results in Estonian (incl accented characters) is even better than in English.
Also true - the whole OCR-ing is only reasonable if there are absolutely no ready-made text subs available anywhere.