FirstLoveMovies

I am going to give a simple and basic description of how to rip subs from a DVD into subtitles which can be uploaded to the net and used with .avi files. It assumes you are using Windows, because I am only describing tools I have used personally. There is a Mac-based tool listed at Subrip's site, and http://forum.doom9.org/ is a good reference for everything else and for things I don't cover very well.

Subtitle Basics

Subs are stored on DVD as bitmaps, so that your DVD player can just place them on top of the picture. When ripped from a DVD these bitmaps are saved in a .SUB file, which usually has an accompanying .IDX file. Many PC-based players can use .SUB and .IDX files to show subtitles for an .avi file.

However, not all PC-based players, and no physical DVD players that I know of, can use subs which are in .SUB format. They need to be translated into text. The most common and universal text subtitle format is .SRT, which bascially consists of the time and duration to show each subtitle followed by the text of that subtitle.

Step One - Getting the DVD onto your hard drive

The .VOB files on a DVD contain the video, audio, and subtitles for that DVD. To prevent easy copying they are typically encrypted. You need to get a program such as "DVDFab Decryptor", "DVD Decryptor" (in File mode), or "DVDShrink" to get the unencrypted VOB files (and the IFO/BUP files which tell programs exactly what's where in the VOB files) onto your hard drive.

All three I listed are free. "DVDFab Decryptor" at http://www.dvdfab.com/free.htm is (unlike the others) still being developed and therefore will sometimes be able to read a newer DVD with advanced protection.

Step One and a Half - Getting just .SUB/.IDX files (optional!!!)

If you only want the subs in .sub/.idx form and already have AutoGK (an encoding tool) installed:

Under "Advance Settings" select "Use external subtitles" and then select one of the subtitle tracks in the main window. As AutoGK produces the AVI it will also create an .idx and a .sub (inside a .rar). Some PC players can use those files directly.

You can also post just those files on FLM and there are several people who will be happy to do the rest of the work creating the .srt file. If you don't have AutoGK I assume there are other programs which will create the .SUB/.IDX files, but why don't you just go on to Step Two and try Subrip, it's not so hard.

Step Two - Use Subrip to create the SRT file

You need a program named Subrip. Its home page is at http://zuggy.wz.cz/

After running it, select the "Open VOBs" menu or the VOB toolbar button. Then click the "Open IFO" button and go to the directory with the VOB and IFO files you saved in Step One. Choose the .IFO file for the movie, which will be named something like "VTS_01_0.IFO" but the _01_ might be _02_ or _03_ etc. It will then show you which VOBs are associated with that IFO. It is usually easy to tell which of multiple .IFOs is correct, because it will have the most associated VOBs. But sometimes experimentation is necessary, same as with AutoGK.

The available subtitles should show in the dropdown in the "Language Stream" section. Select the one you want. Now press the "Start" button.
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The program will now look through the VOBs for subtitles bitmaps. When it finds one, it will attempt to divide the subtitle up into individual characters. It will then highlight that character and ask you to supply the letter that character represents. Type it in, and click Ok. Case is important: if it's a capital letter make sure you capitalize it. For convenience Subrip also shows you a selection of accented characters and special symbols to choose from, in case your keyboard can't handle them.

Keep doing this for each successive character. Subrip remembers what you have already told it and skips repeats, so pretty quickly it will be zipping along. Sometimes it will show you two characters at one time (i.e. ff or ft), just enter them both.

Subrip allows you to select Bold or Italic or Underline when you enter a subtitle. My recommendation is to leave those alone, at least until you get comfortable with using Subrip. Not all players can deal with them, and Subrip sometimes confuses italic and non-italic letters and switches back and forth in a single line, which requires cleanup.
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When it finishes, it will show you the .SRT window with the resulting subs. You need to Use Save As to save it. Simple!

I recommend, though, that you then try the "Post OCR Spelling Correction" choice under "Corrections". The most important of these corrections is "Try to correct l and I". Many DVDs use a subtitle font where an upper case I and a lower case L look the same, and Subrip can't tell them apart. Most of these can usually be corrected automatically though. The '' and " correction seems to come up a lot too.

After saving the corrected .srt, you should also save the character map. This way if you want to reprocess the subs (because you made some sort of mistake the first time) you won't have to reenter all the characters. FYI, the author of Subrip has made available a character file with many different fonts predefined, but I have had one DVD work flawlessly with it but all others fail with wrong characters, so I am not sure it's worth the potential time saved.

Good luck and feel free to ask questions!

Very nice, FLL. Just a couple of points:

However, not all PC-based players, and no physical DVD players that I know of, can use subs which are in .SUB format.

Er.. all. That is how subtitles are shown when you watch a DVD movie. The conversion to .srt is for convenience (very small size) and editing (not possible with the bitmap style subtitles in the .sub/,idx format). It also forms the basis for translation into other languages.

If you want to convert the downloaded .avi movie into a DVD that a standalone DVD player can play, and you want the subs too, then the .srt subs need to be converted back to the bitmap style .sub/.idx pair.

If you feel the subs are out of sync (maybe the subs were ripped from a different DVD than the the one used to rip the movie) you can correct them using Subtitle Workshop.

emuler wrote:

However, not all PC-based players, and no physical DVD players that I know of, can use subs which are in .SUB format.

Er.. all. That is how subtitles are shown when you watch a DVD movie. The conversion to .srt is for convenience (very small size) and editing (not possible with the bitmap style subtitles in the .sub/,idx format). It also forms the basis for translation into other languages.

If you want to convert the downloaded .avi movie into a DVD that a standalone DVD player can play, and you want the subs too, then the .srt subs need to be converted back to the bitmap style .sub/.idx pair.

I could have sworn that I have come across a PC player which didn't support external .sub files but does support .srt, but perhaps that is no longer true (or I hallucinated and it was never true). Doesn't matter much anyway.

My MAJOR point in that sentence is this, to clarify: many physical DVD players which play DivX/XviD .avi files can display subtitles when they are present in .srt format. (Philips 642 is the most well-known, I own one of those and one of another make.) Neither of them can display subtitles in .sub format. There are many reasons .srt files are preferred to .sub files, but that right there is a major one of them.

Well done FLL!

WOWSERS!!

Getting ready to head out to work now, but I can't wait to get home tonight to figure this all out!!

Very cool! Thanks for taking the time to step-by-step this process for us, FLL!

(I'll let you know how CLEAR it is, when I actually sit down and put it to task! )

Profundo Graci!

kev.

emuler wrote: If you want to convert the downloaded .avi movie into a DVD that a standalone DVD player can play, and you want the subs too, then the .srt subs need to be converted back to the bitmap style .sub/.idx pair.

Not in the software that I use ..............ConvertXtoDVD can pick up either format, automatically if the filename is the same.

emuler wrote: If you feel the subs are out of sync (maybe the subs were ripped from a different DVD than the the one used to rip the movie) you can correct them using Subtitle Workshop.

Subtitle Workshop is also very good for the final 'proof reading'/editing. SubRip is good but all OCR software will turn up some peculiarities.

Nice one FLL! ........very informative!

Thanks, everyone!

My intent was to make the top post simple and clear without a lot of extraneous info, but the followup posts are a good place to add additional notes, so here is one.

I didn't say it, because it was assumed, but the process I described works only on subtitles which can be turned on and off from the DVD menus or the DVD player remote control.

Some movies instead have "hard subs", i.e. subtitles that were added to the original film print so a subbed version could be viewed in theaters, and then the DVD was made from such a print.

Subrip has the ability to rip these subs, too. It's the "Open Hard Subbed Video files" menu option. The only problem is, it never works as well or as easily as the process I described at the top of this thread, and in fact it usually doesn't work at all. I have tried it on half a dozen films, both TVRips and commercially released DVDs, and have always given up after 2 or 3 hours of tweaking settings. The problem is that the OCR process reading the subs depends on the same character looking the same way every time and standing out easily from the background, and that rarely happens. The Subrip site has a tutorial "Ripping subtitles from video files using SubRip" which is about ripping hardsubs, and the example shows a film with a nicely outlined font. None of the films I have wanted to rip subs for have had such a font, which is probably why I haven't been successful.

Having just talked kev through ripping subtitles reminded me of something.......
If you release with screenshots & generate them from within Media Player Classic (& possibly other players too) make sure you do the screens either before ripping the subs or rename/move them to stop the player from accessing them, otherwise your screencaps will gain slight black bars at the top & bottom.
EDIT:......and another observation.......if you decrypt a DVD9 using DVD Shrink or similar & reduce the overall size to fit a DVD5 expect problems with SubRip if using the compressed VOB's. I'm guessing once again, the compression slightly alters the bitmap characters, sufficient to confuse SubRip. It will usually work but a 10 minute job will turn in to something in excess of an hour as it repeatedly refuses to recognise repeat characters. You can also expect the same problems if the source is any form of re-authored DVDR.

lb