Subtitle Ripping Guide for DivX
Okay, I thought it would be nice to create a tutorial
on how to rip subtitles from a DVD. I think people are shying away from
doing this merely because it sounds difficult. So let me tell you now
that it is laughingly easy to do! You can even make your own subtitles,
but for now let's just stick to taking what already exists.
But why bother getting subtitles? Why not?! Subtitles
take practically no memory on the DivX! In a two hour movie such as
my following example 'The Mummy' DVD to DivX Rip, the whole of the subtitles
will take a micro sized 50KB of extra space! I have never come across
a DivX CD that didn't have many many times that space left on the CD
after the film has finished. Also, its rather cool to be able to show
your friends the DivX you made that has the option of subtitles.
There are only two DivX Player's that I use to play subtitles:
MicroDVD and RedZ DivX Player. Therefore this guide only deals with
the subtitle formats these use. However, on the digital digest download
section you will fin utilities to convert to just about any subtitle
format you need. You'll also find subtitles for most of the popular
movies for download on DivX Digest too =).
I use Redz DivX player if I don't make MicroDVD menus
and stuff for my DVD, because there is no thinking to it. You just open
the movie in it, select the subtitles and it plays. Now, onto the conversion.
I am going to make a DivX with subtitles of The Mummy as an example.
Rip the VOB files from the film to your Hard Disk as explained in
my Flask Mpeg Guide. Open SubRip and select:
File > Open Vob
Up will pop the selection dialogue box seen below. Under
the red Action heading choose the SubPictures to text via OCR (C).
Click on the Open Dir. button and find the Vob's that you Ripped from
the DVD. Put a tick alongside the VOB files you want to rip the text
from (A). If you find that the default
language is the one you do not want, for example, you may want German
subtitles, but instead it gives you English. In that case choose another
stream from the drop down stream list (B).
Once you have selected the Vobs and the correct stream
(by trial and error) you are ready to go! Make sure the Vob files are
the ones with the film on it, of course, and not something else on the
DVD. Okay, click start!
Note: DVD's
use actual picture files for their subtitles. This means that the computer
has to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert the picture
to a text file.
The following window will appear next to make sure the
picture is clear. If the text looks white on a black background click
the OK button. If not, change the 'color 3' box (or whatever it is called)
to another number; or you could try the auto detect button. When it
looks correct click the OK button.
If you are running the program for the first time the
computer must learn the letters. Be patient and answer its questions
by typing in the correct letter as it asks. It is important not to put
in the wrong letter and also to make sure that the capital and lower
case letters are the correct. Don't worry, the reading process will
get faster as you go along. After the first 30 or more letters the computer
will almost completely take over.
The text that the computer has read is shown in a white
box below. The picture that the DVD uses is shown above it. If you cannot
see the white Subtitles box, click the 'show subtitles text windows'
to see it. Now, sit back and wait until the whole file is ripped.
Now the computer has learned what the text looks like
you can save this information to a file for future use. This is a good
feature because you do not need to tell the computer what certain letters
are every time you use it. To save this information, go to: Characters
Matrix > Save Characters Matrix.
When you choose your next Vob file to rip, you can go
to Characters Matrix > Open Characters Matrix and load this information
once again i.e.
Now the important thing to do is save the text you just
ripped. Go to the white Subtitles window and select: File
> Save as.
The processed text is literally nothing more than a text
file even though it may have the extension .srt or .sub or whatever.
If you were to open your subtitles in wordpad they would look something
like this:
MicroDVD can read the SubRip format, but you won't be
able to use MicroDVD's more advanced features like setting font face,
size, position, color for each subtitle line separately. So it is preferable
to convert this to MicroDVD's native subtitle format first. To do this,
open 'SubRip Convert'. In the frame rate box (B)
select 25 if you use a PAL CD and 29.7 if you use NTSC or type in whatever
you use. Find the input file (i.e. the one you just ripped) by using
the browse button (A). Once done,
click the 'Save' button and choose where you wish to save it.
The finished file should have a .txt extension unless
you change it to something else. The converted file will look like this
if you open it with a word processor:
Ignore the bracketed numbers as they tell the DivX or
MicroDVD player when to put the text on the screen. The bar lines (i.e.
| ) tells MicroDVD to put the text after
the bar below the previous.
And here is how the finished DivX looks, cool huh!
Editing the Subtitles
If you get a really weird DVD such as a multi-angle DVD,
you may have to select individual Vob files merge the subtitles together.
This is also very easy to do since it is just text! Open the first of
the text files you have converted in Wordpad (or another word processor).
Then open Wordpad again and open the next converted file in that. Copy
the text from the second text file and paste it into the first. Do the
same again for each text file until you have just one single text file
with the text of the movie in it.
You can open the text in any word processor such as Microsoft
Word and spell check it too. Once you are happy with the finished file
save it with the SAME name as the DivX movie and use the extension .sub.
I called my DivX movie: 'mummy.avi' because it was a DVD rip of the
film 'The Mummy'. So to save the subtitles text I will save the file
as: "mummy.sub". Please include the quotation marks (" ") to force the
word processor to save it with the .sub extension otherwise it will
save it as something like mummy.sub.txt or mummy.sub.doc!
That's it! Save both the text file and the AVI file on
the same CD and you are finished. Open the CD in Redz DivX Player and
it will tell you that subtitles have been found. You can choose the
font you want and the color too.
Synchronizng the Subtitles
Occasionally, the text and speech on the subtitles is
not in tandem. This is usually a framerate problem because, for whatever
reason, the frames do not match the text time codes. I suggest you don't
get rid of your "original" subrip files in case this happens! The reason
I say that is that the latest version of subrip converter has an option
for automatically changing ALL the time codes on your subtitle text
file before it converts it to the MicroDVD format that we all like ;^).
This kills two birds with one stone so to speak.
Here is how it works. Open your newly converted subtitle
file (something.srt) as though you were going to convert it to the MicroDVD
format (i.e. something.sub). Now, everything works in tenths of a second,
so 10 would represent 1 seconds delay. Usually the movie will be correct
but need sliding either left or right to make it match the rest of the
film. Where it says, "add this time to each subtitle", if you put 10
it would make the subtitles appear 1 second later than they do already.
If you put -10 it would make the subtitles appear I second earlier than
it used to appear, simple huh!
Where it says "Make every hour longer by.." it will stretch
the subtitles out longer. So by putting 10 in it, it will gradually
move the subtitle positions until they appear 1 second later by the
time an hour of film is played. By choosing -10, you guessed it, it
will gradually shorten the the time that each subtitle appears by 1
second.
Foreign Language Character-Sets
Sorry, subrip can only handle roman style text such as
English, French etc. Your only option is to try Flask Mpeg's subtitle
feature in DVD mode. It works most of the time so should for non-roman
style text too.
MicroDVD INI Files
To make a CD that will tell MicroDVD player to offer the
option of subtitles, you must make an .ini file. If you want to learn
about writing these then go to the creating menu's part of my multimedia
DivX section. For those of you who don't want the hassle I have designed
the following ones for you to use. Just change the names and stuff to
fit your own movie.
Just copy the text to notepad and rename the parts highlighted
in red to your own movie files. For example, if my movie was titanic
I'd put: Title=Titanic ; AVIName=titanic.avi.
Lets say my subtitles were German, I'd put: 1=GER
German ; File=titanic.sub. You get
the idea!
|
CD
|
| [Micro DVD Ini File] |
| |
| [MAIN] |
| Title=The Mummy |
| ID=12345678 |
| Delay=1 |
| |
| [MOVIE] |
| Directory=. |
| AVIName=mummy.avi |
| |
| [SUBTITLES] |
| Directory=. |
| Format=0 |
| Lines=2 |
| EstimateDisplayDuration=0 |
| 1=ENG English |
| File=mummy.sub |
Once changed, save it in notepad by calling it: "Mdvd.ini"
(with quotation marks to force it to have the .ini filename). Just copy
this file along with your movie and subtitles text to your CD-R (don't
put them in folders) and everything should play fine!
A Double CD INI File
A two CD INI file is not difficult to do either. Just
copy the FULL subtitle document (e.g. mummy.sub) onto both CD's. You
do NOT need to split them when using MicroDVD! Then change the red highighted
parts of the INI below. The only difference is you must tell MicroDVD
how long each avi movie is in frames. So in my example the first part
of the movie is CD1Frames=112000. Which
means the AVI has 112000 frames in it. The amount of frames can easily
be found by opening the file in VirtualDub and looking at File > File
Information. It will then say how many frames where it says "# of frames
(time)".
|
CD 1
|
|
| [Micro DVD Ini File] |
|
| |
|
| [MAIN] |
|
| Title=Movie Name |
|
| ID=1234678 |
|
| CDNumber=1 |
|
| Delay=1 |
|
| |
|
| [MOVIE] |
|
| Directory=. |
|
| AVIName=movie1.avi |
|
| AVI2Name=movie2.avi |
|
| CD1Frames=112000 |
|
| CD2Frames=114000 |
|
| |
|
| [SUBTITLES] |
|
| Directory=. |
|
| Format=2 |
|
| Lines=2 |
|
| EstimateDisplayDuration=0 |
|
| 1=ENG English |
|
| File=movie.sub |
|
|
CD 2
|
| [Micro DVD Ini File] |
| |
| [MAIN] |
| Title=Movie Name |
| ID=9101112 |
| CDNumber=2 |
| Delay=1 |
| |
| [MOVIE] |
| Directory=. |
| AVIName=movie1.avi |
| AVI2Name=movie2.avi |
| CD1Frames=112000 |
| CD2Frames=114000 |
| |
| [SUBTITLES] |
| Directory=. |
| Format=2 |
| Lines=2 |
| EstimateDisplayDuration=0 |
| 1=ENG English |
| File=movie.sub |
|