#5 Subtitles, Baby!

[tominglis]

The application really really needs to support subtitles. Not only is this crucially important for watching films in a foreign language which you don't speak fluently, but also there are many films in your native language which have brief conversations or scenes in a foreign language. This is really really common!

Although there still seems to be something to be desired in the readiness of forthcoming subtitle stream technologies, it is possible to hard code subtitles onto the file (and this is something that many prefer anyway and so should always be an option)?

[tominglis]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1791851
Originator: YES

How developed is the Ogg Writ format? It seems to be used elsewhere and has a reference encoder. Is it possible to incorporate this into Thoggen?

[Tim Müller]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1164059
Originator: NO

> How developed is the Ogg Writ format? It seems to be used
> elsewhere and has a reference encoder. Is it possible to
> incorporate this into Thoggen?

The spec for Ogg Writ looks pretty much done, but it clearly says it's not finished yet or endorsed by the Xiph foundation, so I don't really know what the status is. I didn't know there was a reference encoder - is there? Where is this format used? I've never seen it used anywhere or seen a file with Writ content.

In any case, Writ isn't really too useful in the Thoggen context, because it only deals with subtitle _text_. DVD subtitles, however, are on the DVD in form of subpictures/bitmaps.

[tominglis]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1791851
Originator: YES

Here is a link to the Writ encoder / decoder:

https://trac.xiph.org/browser/trunk/py-ogg2

Here is a reference to converting subtitles from pictures to text and then muxing the SRT files to OGM, using mencoder. I am not sure whether it is possible to convert SRT to Writ though?

http://axljab.homelinux.org/Mencoder_DVD_to_OGM#Ripping_Subtitles

Hope this is helpful,

T.

[Zhang Weiwu]

Logged In: YES
user_id=769477
Originator: NO

The DVDs are in form of subpictures/bitmaps. My question is: is there any accompany format (proprietary or opensource) that can be used to make ogg capable of subpicture/bitmap style subtitile?

For example, I often got files with .sub extension and put them into the same folder as .avi, I got the subtitle in subpictures/bitmaps. This is ugly (because .sub better be embeded in avi format) but it works. Users prefer to see something ugly than being not able to see something (subtitle). Is it possible thoggen also produce these .sub formats? I knew thoggen is not supposed to be a feature-rich tool with a lot of editing possibility but mostly purpose is to backup DVD, but subtitle is IMPORTANT information on DVD that ought to be backed up, in this way or another.

If someone think it's only useful to watch moves in a foreign language: -> the fact is MOST MOVIES I watch is in a foreign language (99% case, English), and this is true for MOST Chinese people (I am Chinese), because we watch hollywood, we watch european movies, we don't produce a lot of good movies ourselves. This is also ture for almost all developing countries (that makes up majority of the global population), because they don't produce much, they consume western culture. So in this regard subtitle is a vital feature for most users.

[Tim Müller]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1164059
Originator: NO

> The DVDs are in form of subpictures/bitmaps. My question is: is
> there any accompany format (proprietary or opensource) that can
> be used to make ogg capable of subpicture/bitmap style subtitle?

Yes, there are multiple options:

(a) use OggMNG (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/OggMNG)
this is a spec that's not official or finished yet though

(b) use OggSpots (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/OggSpots)
also not official or finished yet (but looks more alive than OggMNG)

(c) just use one of the above but with a custom stream
marker and let players deal with it.

Problem is that in any case it will take some time until players will catch up and implement whatever we're going to use, since none of these formats are used anywhere yet.

[Neil Muller]

It may be worth looking at kate (http://wiki.xiph.org/OggKate) as the libkate sources include a patch for thoggen. Currently, it looks like vlc & gstreamer (recently) support kate - it's unclear when other players will support it.

[Tim Müller]

Yeah, I've got the patch somewhere and meant to apply it once the kate elements made it into a gstreamer release (which is going to be any day now).