Subtitle Minefield - How many .SUBs ARE there?

[13ernie]

Hi Guys -
My language is English and most movies are in English so I haven't worried about subs too much. But I've got "The House with the Laughing Windows" which is Italian and I've got a .sub (about 2.9MB) in English and a .idx (49KB) files. MP Classic plays fine using these, but I want to convert them to plain text so I can use them with V-Dub.

Now here's the trouble: I have seen, I think, references to at least 3 different and mutually incompatible subtitle formats, all using .sub extension. I have also seen bandied about numerous utilities which may open/convert these to other formats. My experience so far is that nothing I have tried will have anything to do with whatever .sub it is that I have, never mind convert it to something else. The most sspecific advice I have seen is a very terse "Use SubRip to OCR it". Sounds good, but the version of SubRip I have has nothing clickable that leads to opening .sub files. It onlly wants VOBs or IFOs.

It would be awfully nice if somebody could steer me through this mess and show me the right utility to use.

There must have been plenty of scope to get this subtitle business right, so why did everybody seem to need to go off in their own directions?

[jellysandwich]

Where did you get those subtitles from? If you have the DVD, then there's no problem. Simply decrypt it with DVDDecrypter. If you got them from somewhere else, then... we can't really help you.

js

[unmei]

the .sub/.idx combination is usually called "vobsub"s. The "OCR with subrip" way is the right track. I don't know how old your copy of SubRip is, but mine, when i go the normal way to open an IFO, the file select dialog presents "IFO, IDX, BUP" as filter - and selecting your vobsub .idx there works just fine..

[falcon2000eg]

Unmei is right get subrip from the sticky and use it.