Soft Subs vs. Hard Subs

[orion44]

Which ones do you prefer?
Which ones are more pleasant to watch, and look more naturally on the movie?

[J_Darnley]

I don't know about which ones look more natural, I guess neither if you use sufficient bitrate with the hard subs. I prefer soft subs so they can be rendered at my screen size instead of at the video size and in the padding rather than on the video

[orion44]

I don't know about which ones look more natural, I guess neither if you use sufficient bitrate with the hard subs. I prefer soft subs so they can be rendered at my screen size instead of at the video size and in the padding rather than on the video

Does this mean that it's not possible at all to position hard subs on the black border?

[roozhou]

Does this mean that it's not possible at all to position hard subs on the black border?

Right. Hard subs are just inside the video.

[invisible]

hardsubs are terrible, and people who still use them today are slow.

[turok]

People still use em. I've heard from an encoder more experienced than myself that a video that is 1280x720 and has softsubs equals a 1440 (or was it 1920?)x1080 no subs in terms of how much resources it takes to make it play. Softsubs I recommend all around but if ur computer is weak then hardsubs is the way to go. I don't mind hardsubs.

[invisible]

That might be true but hardware decoding of HD is already gaining a lot of ground and growing. With (when) dxva working correctly on windows and even vdpau for linux (hopefully vaapi soon), any HD compliant video with softsubs will play without a problem already on supported players. I never even tried getting into 1080p video with software decoding, it was unfeasible or inefficient at best.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Hardsubs are useful to me for BluRay backups. The tools for OCRing SUP files ripped via eac3to are just not mature compared to processing VobSubs into SRT with SubRip. The latter is practically painless, while the former is like pulling teeth.

SupTitle is a great little avisynth filter that has the option to just burn in forced subs, which is all I ever need.

That's just my two cents, though :)

~MiSfit

[nurbs]

@Blue_MiSfit:
Maybe you can try converting the blu-ray SUPs to VobSub with BDSup2Sub and then use SubRip.

I prefer softsubs because you can have multiple language subs in one file.

[Assassinator]

People still use em. I've heard from an encoder more experienced than myself that a video that is 1280x720 and has softsubs equals a 1440 (or was it 1920?)x1080 no subs in terms of how much resources it takes to make it play.

No way. Softsubs (assuming plain text subs or vobsub) takes only a very small, pretty much insignificant, amount of extra processing power to render. While 1080p takes significantly more resources to decode compared to 720p.

...Unless if you're softsubbing some animated karaoke with stuff flying all over the place or something, then yes it will probably lag like hell. But that's a case of extreme stupidity on the encoder's part, so it doesn't count.

[0xdeadbeef]

It's not really possible to give a short answer to the TS's question, as the underlying conditions are missing. Thus the long version:

Usually, soft subs are the way to go since they can be switched off, you can have multiple subtitle tracks and the player can even move them (e.g. for 21:9 displays).
However, apart from their positive qualities, soft subs also have some limitations. E.g. DVD subtitles (also VobSub used in MKV) are limited to a 16 color palette, where each frame can only use 4 of these colors where one is the (usually transparent) background color. Thus it's no possible to do any appreciable amount of ani-aliasing, not to speak of other colorful effects.

So for nicer looking forced subs on DVDs, it might be better to use hard subs. Also the ability to render SRTs or VobSub subtitles in MKV varies significantly with the player used. Again, for forced subs in one language it can make sense to hard code them.

In BD (and HD-DVD) subtitles each frame can use a distinctive color palette of 256 colors, which makes it possible to use full anti-aliasing, text in multiple colors, some palette animation effects and even the addition of pictures to the subtitle track (as seen e.g. in Wall-E or Slumdog Millionaire).

Then again, due to certain limitations in the renderer's specification (mainly memory and bandwidth), using heavily animated subtitles involves the risk of making it impossible for a standalone to render them.
So for people who love to watch their Japanese Animes with animated English subtitles, again hard subs might be the better choice.

[KoD]

0xdeadbeef, your post seems to suggest you've never heard of ass/ssa subtitles. Which is what actually everyone uses.

[0xdeadbeef]

0xdeadbeef, your post seems to suggest you've never heard of ass/ssa subtitles. Which is what actually everyone uses.
Dunno how you come to that conclusion. However the thread is about hard vs. soft subs, not about different types of text bases subs. Besides, "everyone" is a little gutsy anyway, as most media streamers don't support anything beyond SRT and maybe SUB/IDX for MKV. For BDs/DVDs, this is out of the question anyway.
So what exactly is your point?

[orion44]

I have a question about the creation of DVD subtitles.
Many DVD movies that I watch have a great looking subtitles.

Does anyone know what tools or software do these
professional studios use to create such great looking subtitles?

Couple of years ago, I created some subtitles on DVD with DVD Lab Pro,
but no matter which settings, font or size I used, they didn't look quite
as good as those subtitles on DVD's created by movie studios.

[Inspector.Gadget]

0xdeadbeef, your post seems to suggest you've never heard of ass/ssa subtitles.

Author of BDSup2Sub


Smooth move, ex-lax :p

[orion44]

hehe lol

[avivahl]

It's like telling the chef he does not know how to cook. :P

[Zachs]

my 2 cents:

For foriegn part of the dialogue, I'd usually do a hardsub. That's the same as if you watch your free-to-air TV shows and you'd usually always want the subs to show anyway since you don't understand the language. On top of that I'd still have the softsubs as SRT as they are like the teletext subs of your TV which you can turn on and off.

[invisible]

I guess soft subs are more valuable if you speak more than one language.