AVIsynth filter to display blu-ray subs without any conversion?

[djloewen]

I am a fan of hardcoded subtitles, primarily because I don't like dealing with OCR. The trick is, I want the subtitles to look exactly the same as they do on the source material. For DVDs, my understanding is that VobSub does exactly that (correct me if I'm wrong).

For blu-rays, I've seen options that involve OCR, and I've seen options that involve "downgrading" to DVD-format subs (i.e 4-color palette, etc). I'm not aware of an AVIsynth filter than can just put the blu-ray subs in exactly as they are meant to be. Does such a filter exist? If not, how difficult would it be to write one? What difficulties would there be in doing so? Presumably it wouldn't need to resize, because you could apply the subs in the script, and then resize it yourself with the subs in.

The only feature I would want/need in such a filter would be the option to show only forced subs.

[Inspector.Gadget]

You may be able to do this with a tool (SUPread for instance) that can export SUP files to PNG images (optionally dowsizing to 720p) and then overlaying those PNGs over the original frame with an Avisynth filter like ImageSource(), ImageReader(), etc. This would probably be an awful hack though, and will require confirmation by someone that knows more about the innards of Avisynth than I do.

[djloewen]

Thank you for the reply. I don't see a way of doing it with those filters. At best, I could create a video with all of the subtitles appearing in sequential order, and overlay it with the original video, but then I'd have no way of setting the correct timing of the subtitles using the timestamps.

For someone who knows how to write an AVIsynth filter, I can't imagine that this would be a very difficult task - assuming the image files and timestamps can be sorted out first into some manageable format (say, using SUPread), it would just be a matter of "add this image at this time, for this long. then add this one at this time, for this long"...

Does anyone know of someone who knows how to do that sort of thing? I would think that some others would find this a very useful tool as well, but if I'm the only person who wants it, I'd be happy to pay someone to code it...

[qyot27]

Concerning the PNG idea, there is a way for SubtitleCreator which will allow images (I've only used BMP, but it may work with others) to be used along with SRT timing to create a DVD sup file - it works by using HTML <p> & </p> tags to enclose the paths to the images. So the type of functionality needed does exist in SC, but whether AviSynth can read them I don't know. If VSFilter can handle them correctly, then you might be able to do it using TextSub().