Adding subtitles to video

From The Newcastle upon Tyne Wiki

How to add subtitles to video

You might want to add subtitles to a video if the video is in a foreign language or for deaf viewers. There are a number of methods, depending on the playback options of your media player. Some media players will show subtitles that are in an external file while basic DVD players require the subtitles to be a part of the original video file.

For example, I have an Italian film called Sedotta e abbandonata.avi and the subtitles are in a file called Sedotta e abbandonata.sub. Notice that the subtitle file must have the exact same name as the original video file.

Hardcoding the subtitles into the video file means that you can't switch the subtitles on and off. Sometimes you will need to hardcode if your media player does not have a "select/show subtitle" option.

You also have to decide where you want to place your subtitles - at the bottom of the picture or in black space at the bottom.

There are extra video notes here: http://www.healthwealthandmusic.co.uk/wikis/worldwideweb.html

Subtitle websites

Collections of subtitles that go with particular video downloads are available from a number of websites.

http://subscene.com/

http://www.rrttt.com/

http://subtitles.o2.cz/

http://www.all4divx.com/

http://www.nowsubtitles.com/index

Subtitle conversion

As usual, nothing is simple in Computer World and some playback programs require subtitles in a particular format and you may have to use a conversion program!

Here is a table of the current state of mess:

Here is a table with the syntactical differences of different existing subtitle formats for which Chris Chiu wrote conversion scripts to CMML.

Subtitle Name	Extension	Subtitle Type	Character Encoding	Line Break	Text Styling	Metadata Info	Timings	Timing Precision
AQTitle	*.aqt	Text-based	None	Yes	No	No	Framings	Dependent on Frame
JACOSub	*.usf	Text-based	None	Yes	Yes	No	Elapsed Time	10 Milliseconds (1/100th sec)
MicroDVD	*.sub	Text-based	None	Yes	No	No	Framings	Dependent on Frames
MPSub	*.sub	Text-based	None	Yes	No	Yes	Sequential Time	10 Milliseconds (1/100th sec)
Phoenix Subtitle	*.pjs	Text-based	None	No	No	No	Framings	Dependent on Frames
RealText	*.rt	HTML-based	Unicode (UTF-8)	Yes	Yes (SMIL)	No	Elapsed Time	10 Milliseconds (1/100th sec)
SubRip	*.srt	Text-based	Informally Unicode	Yes	No	No	Elapsed Time	1 Millisecond (1/1000th sec)
SSA/ASS	*.ssa	Text-based	None	No	Yes	Yes	Elapsed Time	10 Milliseconds (1/100th sec)
SubViewer	*.sub	Text-based	None	Yes	No	Yes	Elapsed Time	10 Milliseconds (1/100th sec)
SAMI	*.smi	HTML-based	Unicode (Windows-1252)	Yes	Yes (CSS)	Yes	Framings	Dependent on Frames
Universal Subtitle	*.usf	XML	Unicode (UTF-8)	No	Yes (XML DTD)	No	Elapsed Time	1 Millisecond (1/1000th sec)
VOBSub	.sub, .idx	Image-based	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	Elapsed Time	1 Millisecond (1/1000th sec)
VPlayer	*.txt	Text-based	None	Yes	No	No	Framing or Time	10 Milliseconds (1/100th sec)