Need Help with (Partial) Subtitles

[WinstonSmith6079]

I don't use subtitles. But some movies have parts where characters speak in other languages than English, such as A Bridge Too Far where the plot opens on some European family in their home speaking in some European language, or Return of the Jedi where Jabba the Hutt speaks in whatever language hutts speak in, or The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring where the elves speak in Elvish. You get the idea.

Such subtitles are often not "hard-subbed": Either you get full subtitles for all dialogue, or none at all for any. I need the "partial" subtitles for several of my movies. How do I get this?

I typically use DivX Player for my .AVIs and PowerDVD 7 for my DVD images and DVD-R files and folders. Please help!

[Dark_Shroud]

Have you tried any other players for .avi files? Because even Windows Media Player can play soft subs. That Divx player is old news and isn't very good. I would suggest that you download CCCP to get the proper codecs and use WMP or MPC (Media Player Classic, it comes in CCCP) to watch .avi files and other video files.

[WinstonSmith6079]

Have you tried any other players for .avi files? Because even Windows Media Player can play soft subs. That Divx player is old news and isn't very good. I would suggest that you download CCCP to get the proper codecs and use WMP or MPC (Media Player Classic, it comes in CCCP) to watch .avi files and other video files.

Okay, but how is CCCP better than DivX? What's good about CCCP? How is DivX bad?

But most of all, will it help my problem of the lack of "partial" subtitles? ???

Thanks.

[Dark_Shroud]

CCCP installs filters from FFDShow based off direct show. They will work with any player that allows external codecs. Namely WMP & MPC. Divx player is very limited. The last time I even tried to use it, I couldn't even get it to run. So yes, if the files have subs CCCP will play them. :)

And please note, only Divx player is bad Divx 6.x codecs are quite decent.

[WinstonSmith6079]

CCCP installs filters from FFDShow based off direct show. They will work with any player that allows external codecs. Namely WMP & MPC. Divx player is very limited. The last time I even tried to use it, I couldn't even get it to run. So yes, if the files have subs CCCP will play them. :)

And please note, only Divx player is bad Divx 6.x codecs are quite decent.

Okay, but I have (at least) one more question: Is there any way to get my present players to do "partial" subtitles? Do I need some...special kind of .SRT or .SUB files that will give me the "partial" subtitles that I need instead of all subtitles? ('Coz I don't have those. [Perhaps I can aquire them if needed.])

[WinstonSmith6079]

*sigh!* Okay, forget about .AVI files for a bit....

I was using PowerDVD 7 to watch A Bridge Too Far, a great movie...so I've heard. But right at the beginning of the film, I encountered the problem that I described above. My copy of A Bridge Too Far is not in .AVI but is an .ISO of a DVD, all 4.35GB of it. But despite its size, none of the menus are included. There's a few subtitled languages that can be switched on from PowerDVD's panel, but none of them are English. And as I've said I don't want subtitles throughout the film but only whenever there's non-English being spoken.

So what can I do about this? Try to find another copy of the movie and d/l that too, even though the audio & video quality of this copy is primo...? ??? I'd hope there would be a much more simple and quick solution than all that!

[WinstonSmith6079]

C'mon! I finished d/ling A Bridge Too Far more than a week ago! I'd really like to watch it, and that in full, all normal-like without missing pieces. So could someone please help within this millennium? ??? Or is there not one single person who has knowledge of how this is done?

[kluelos]

For a simple, fast, easy answer? No.

You're going to have to create your own subtitles. Even if you already have, say, a .srt file, they're not easily edited, whereas you'll be doing wholesale gutting. Easier to just start over. You'll need a subtitle creation tool. (Several of them out there, mostly freeware, all come with a learning curve).

If a tool imposes some limitations, you can live with that to get the output you want. By the way, exactly what IS that? If you're satisfied with watching it on the computer, or on a DivX-compatible player, that's one thing. If you want universal video DVD disks with switchable subtitles, it's quite another.

You can do subtitles in a separate file, which imposes its own limitations. Or you can flatten the subtitles down into the movie, so they can't be turned off, but you also don't need a video player that can handle subtitle files. This means you need a mixer/converter, of which there are several, free, learning curve.

If you're starting with a video DVD, it's basically in MPEG-2 form. That's old and inefficient, but it's what must be used for video DVD's that work on any player. Now if that's also your desired output, it makes no sense to convert the thing to MPEG-4 only to convert it back to MPEG-2 again. DivX/XVid are MPEG-4.

On the other hand, if the tools you select work only/better with MPEG-4 files, and the dual conversion doesn't harm the quality too much, you may prefer it that way. In any case, the one thing this won't be is fast.

Find several subtitle creation tools, play with them, decide on the one you like best. Create your new subtitle files and make sure they work as expected. This is phase I, and necessary whichever way you go afterwards. Then make a definite decision about output, which will control what you do next.

Understand that this process is not easy. Subtitles are a lot trickier than they appear. Which frame, exactly, to the microsecond, should it start with? How long should it last? How big should it be? What typeface? Where in the frame? Are those last three static, or will they change? It's a painstaking, detailed, prolonged and pretty boring process. If it were easy there'd be a lot more subtitled movies available than actually exist.

Since you only want to do a relatively few frames, you'll have it somewhat easier. Somewhat.

As to the software, well, there are some things that just go together, like bread and butter, death and taxes, or free software and lousy/nonexistent documentation. This'll be as much "teach yourself" as "practice", and mostly by trial and error.

[WinstonSmith6079]

YAAAAAAYY! kluelos is back! YAAAAAAYY! :D

Hmm...well what I want to do is hard-sub those English subtitles into it, 'coz the original film had subtitles for the non-English dialogue. I want them hard-subbed so that they'll always play with the movie, such as on PowerDVD 7 from my HD, or if I want to later burn the DVD to play on DVD players. Of course I don't want to hard-sub subtitles for when the characters speak English. I don't yet know much about formats if anything (other than simple file-formats [.AVI, .MPG, .ISO, etc.]). But I guess I should worry about such formats later when I'm actually going to burn movies to blank DVDs.

I'm gonna try that stuff you said. Wish me luck--I hope I do it right hehehehe

Thanks again, kluelos! :) kluelos is god! *worships kluelos with much chanting and bowing*

[WinstonSmith6079]

Okay, moving right along....

I now have two different copies of A Bridge Too Far. The DVD .ISO I got from here: http://www.torrentspy.com/torrent/120518/A_Bridge_Too_Far and an .AVI copy (one .AVI file) from here: http://www.torrentspy.com/torrent/412856/A...oo_far_ENG_Xvid. As you can see there's a .RAR file in there, 'A_Bridge_too_far_ENG_Xvid.rar', which contains a .SUB file. There's also an .IDX file in there, and I have no idea what an .IDX is, what in the h*** to do with it, and if it matters one iota what I have an .IDX file for in that bundle.

I got the CCCP thing (even though I don't care for Socialism hehehehe) that Dark_Shroud mentioned. I found that the included Media Player Classic will play my .AVI files and my DVD images, which is a good thing (however AFAIK, unlike PowerDVD, it will not play DVD files). I tried playing the .AVI of the film on it with the .SUB file (extracted from the .RAR). Unfortunately I got full subtitles--every bit of spoken dialogue, English and non-English, was subtitled, which sucks and is not the partial subtitles that I've been trying to get. (h***, the original movie had partial subtitles for the non-English dialogue, as that's kind of standard anyway! I don't know why someone would rip/copy such a movie without also ripping/copying that as well--it's part of the f***ing movie, goddamnit! >:( ) I couldn't seem to be able to use the .SUB file with my DVD image copy.

Okay, so what do I do now? ???

BTW, I looked a bit into subtitle creation. I Googled for some programs, but when it all looked a bit overwhelming (at this time), I thought I'd try to get another copy of the film (the .AVI) for the time being and see what I could do. If need be, I could continue to try looking into that and all.... (Needless to say perhaps, but the DVD image copy is of much better quality than the .AVI rip. So, if possible and feasible, I'd prefer to try to "fix" the DVD image copy over the .AVI rip.)

[kluelos]

DVD's are encoded to MPEG-2. .avi's are encoded to MPEG-4. MPEG-2 is much, much older (how long have video DVD's been around?) and much less efficient. An MPEG-4 encode is about 1/4th the size, for the same quality.

It takes a long time, hours, to re-encode something whichever way you are going. So you want not to have to do that if you can. Every re-encode will lose some quality, never gain it. Most avi's are DVD rips, so a lot depends on how well the ripper did the job and what his main considerations were -- size vs quality.

Video DVD's have always had the ability to add subtitles in other languages. This required the use of separate subtitle files, which could be added later. A subtitle file has to be indexed to the video frames, so that the correct subtitle starts at the right scene and stays there long enough to be read. That is the tricky part, and the painstaking part. It's the preferred way of doing subtitles, so it carried over to .avi's. It's preferred because that way you don't have to be bothered with subtitles when you're enjoying "Hamlet" in the original Klingon, but can add them in whatever weakling's tongue others may speak when you try to teach them a little refinement.

So the usual method is to subtitle the entire movie. It's a pretty arduous task. Subtitle files are sequential by their nature, so they're just not made for heavy editing. Since the tying is so tight, you can't generally use one subtitle file in conjunction with another video stream. And yep, that means you'll probably have to dive into learning a subtitling tool to get what you want. As said, that's a necessary step whatever you decide to do with it afterwards.

Now if you are re-encoding to flatten subtitles, this may not be significantly faster than re-encoding to a different codec. I'd test that with a small sample. If it isn't, then you have nothing to lose by doing the re-encode to whatever form you ultimately prefer.

[WinstonSmith6079]

Never mind this as far as A Bridge Too Far goes. I got tired and bought a retail-copy of it on DVD. You can read about it here ('coz I need some help with dumping it to my HD): http://forums.bitcomet.com/index.php?act=S...st=0#entry17844