New to subtitles - please advise

[Dr.Khron]

WARNING: rank newbie questions follow.

Ok, first of all, is there a good general reference or guide I can read that will fill me in on the basics? The Doom9 guides are software specific.

Basically, I'm confused about the difference between text and graphic based subs.

When I ripped my DVD with Robot4Rip, it gave me a bunch of subtitle files, including .SRT and .IDX. From fooling with the program, it appears that .IDX is for graphical subs, and the .SRT are for text based. However, the text based subs are more complete, specifically, they include song lyrics in addition to dialog, whereas the graphical subs are just dialog. How can the same source DVD produce two different sub streams?

Also, Robot4Rip gave me a folder with ALL of the graphical subs as individual BMP files... however, GKnot didn't seem to need the individual BMPS. When I ripped with VobSub directly, it didn't make the folder with all of the individual BMPs. Do I need these, or is this just for editing individual pictures?

Can graphical subs be added as a stream to an MKV container, or do they have to hard encoded into the video stream?

[InuyashaSama]

All I can tell you is that MKV can handle SRT and SSA subtitle streams, and text-based subtitles are always a better choice than graphical subs. Also, almost any DVD/DivX players can read SRT subtitles.
Last, SRT files are much smaller and can be easily edited, while that doesn't apply to graphical subs.

[DigitalDeviant]

Mkv can hold vobsubs just fine. If you're using mkvtoolnix to mux you files just drag the .idx file into the add files window. provided you have the .sub file in the same folder, it will mux the bmp images.

Text subs aren't always a better choice. Vobsubs save you messy OCR work, especialy when you work with languages that use characters that are hard to OCR and difficult to input.

[Dr.Khron]

Guys- thank you very much for your input.


I'm guessing that text-based is the way to go for english language subtitles, even though I thought that the graphical subs looked better.... But I guess that depends on the player: graphical subs will always look the same, but how text subs are displayed depends on the player, correct?


Anyway, the big unanswered question is how I got two sets of subtitles from the DVD I ripped. At first I assumed that VobSub ripped the pics, and then translated them into a text stream. However, as I mentioned, the text sub stream is "more complete" then the graphical stream, in that it contained both dialog and song lyrics, not just dialog.

I guess the DVD contains two separate english sub streams, the text and the graphics?

[DigitalDeviant]

There are no text streams on a DVD; all DVD subtitles are bitmap images. Either your ripping method is skipping the forced lyric subtitles or you have two separate subtitle streams, one of which has both dialog and music, the other just dialog.

If you want text based subtitles, use something like Subrip (http://zuggy.wz.cz/) to OCR them to a text based .srt file. The advantages of this is you'll have a lot more control over fonts, colors, size and position. It's a bit more work though.

If you want to just keep the bitmap subs, use VSrip (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303\) to extract them to a .idx & .sub set. This is less work and preserves the subtitles as they were.