[PLUG-TALK] Information on .srt subtitle file format
John Jason Jordan
johnxj at gmx.com
Mon Aug 8 19:56:47 UTC 2022
Wes,
I found one way. Knowing that SRT subtitle files are mostly text I just
opened it in Mousepad (the Xfce text editor). I got this:
1
00:00:30,280 --> 00:00:02,969
MOVIE TITLE
2
00:01:21,331 --> 00:00:01,695
Hold on.
3
00:01:31,408 --> 00:00:01,627
Okay.
And on it goes. I copied the arrows in the middle and pasted them on
the end of each line, then selected the first time stamp with its
following (middle) arrow and dragged it to the end of the line after the
new arrows. Strangely, this gave me:
1
00:00:02,969 --> 00:00:30,280 -->
MOVIE TITLE
2
00:00:01,695 --> 00:01:21,331 -->
Hold on.
3
00:00:01,627 --> 00:01:31,408 -->
Okay.
And then I did a search and replace to delete the arrows at the end of
the lines. I was just experimenting, so I did this on only the first 50
lines or so. The first problem is that doing this with 1250+ lines will
take a long time. A possibly more serious problem is whether just
saving the file from Mousepad after finishing the editing will actually
produce a usable subtitle file. And if that's not enough problems, when
I look at the time stamps on the above three lines it looks like lines 2
and 3 will appear at the same time as line 1. I don't know if you can
do that.
I have the idx/sub files that were the source for the .srt file, and I
played the movie using them for the subtitles. Line 1 appeared at about
30 seconds into the movie and lasted for about three seconds. So now I
don't know what these time stamps actually represent, i.e.,
'00:00:30,280' must be the start time for line 1, and '00:00:02,969'
must be the duration. When I look at the .srt file in any of my several
subtitle editors the headers above the subtitles are labeled Num,
Start, End, Duration, Text, and the above time stamps appear in the
Start and End columns, while the duration is always -0-, because the
big number is always in the start, with the little number in the end.
I got the idx/sub files out of the MKV file that I created from the DVD
with Handbrake, then used MKVToolnix-GUI to get an .mks file out of it,
and then mkvextract to create the idx/sub files out of the .mks file.
Then I opened the idx/sub files with Subtitle Composer (for the OCR
work), and then exported as .srt. I suspect that opening the idx/sub
files in Subtitle Composer is where something wrong happened. Subtitle
Composer has a Help > Open Handbook button, but clicking on it does
nothing. I searched all over the net for it, but it came up empty. Once
again the devs thought they were done when the code was finished. It
'installs' via appimage. I used the above procedures to produce an .srt
file for another movie, and it worked fine, so I don't know what went
wrong this time.
For another exercise I opened the .idx file in Mousepad, which
displayed a long list with entries like this one, which must be for for
line 1, although I see nothing for duration or end. The filepos is
different for each line.
timestamp: 00:00:30:280, filepos: 000000000
Mousepad refused to open the .sub file, claiming that it was not UTF-8.
Gedit spent a long time giving it a valiant effort, but at 15 minutes
it was still displaying trash and I killed it. I'm curious about what's
in the .sub file.
I think I need to find a full treatise on creating subtitles and how
they work. It would also be useful to find actual documentation for the
programs I am using, except that such was usually never created.
On Sun, 7 Aug 2022 19:18:19 -0700
wes <plug at the-wes.com> dijo:
>if you don't figure out a good solution, send me the file and I will
>use linux command line tool wizardry to do it in a few minutes.
>
>-wes
>
>On Sun, Aug 7, 2022 at 6:47 PM John Jason Jordan <johnxj at gmx.com>
>wrote:
>
>> I've spent the last couple of hours trying to find out the structure
>> of a subtitle .srt file and, most importantly tools for reassembling
>> one. So far, no luck.
>>
>> My problem is that I have an .srt file which is perfect in every
>> respect, except the subtitles do not appear when I play the movie.
>> Looking at the file with any of my various subtitle editors reveals
>> the problem: For each line the onset time and the end time are
>> reversed, e.g., for line one the onset time is 0:00:30.280 and the
>> end time is 0:00:02:969. When the player starts the subtitle at 2
>> seconds and ends it at 30 seconds nothing appears on the screen.
>>
>> The file contains about 1250 lines of subtitles. I could manually
>> copy and rewrite the entries, but that would take a lot of time, not
>> to mention errors. My thinking is that the data in this file has to
>> be some kind of database where 'start' is one field and 'end' is
>> another. Surely there is a way to rename the fields.
>>
>> Any suggestions?
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