ASS to TTXT Converter

[Ensiferous]

Hi doom9,

Would anyone happen to know of a linux command line tool for doing ASS -> TTXT and maintain styling?

I'm doing some mkv -> mp4 transcoding like so many others and I want to maintain my styled subtitles. It seems right now everyone is doing ASS -> SRT -> TTXT via mp4box. However, this removes all styling in the ASS -> SRT step and causes the end result to look horrible without manually redoing the subtitles.

Appreciate any advice.

[Selur]

Is this even possible? Afaik .ass supports way more stuff than ttxt (like special borders, shadows, arbitrarily rotated text, text scaling, animations, additional fonts,..),...

[Ensiferous]

Well it supports a subset of features at least. To be perfectly honest I'd be happy with just having font support in. But I can understand why people wouldn't bother writing a partial converter.

[Keiyakusha]

I don't think such conversion is possible. Not only on linux but on any platform.
Also I don't see anything wrong with that, ttxt is a pretty useless non-human_readable format. Even if conversion is possible, even if you'll do it by hand, there is no renderer with good enough support for it.

[amtm]

I don't think such conversion is possible. Not only on linux but on any platform.

Why would the conversion be impossible? Sure, you can't losslessly go from .ass to .ttxt, but, having looked a bit at the two formats, if all he wants is things like fonts converted over from everything I can see that would be trivial to do.

[Ensiferous]

If I could embed the ass file into a mp4 container then I would in a heart beat, but apparently mp4 doesn't support it and mkv isn't streamable. I already convert to srt format for streaming, but I would like to be able to download the same file and then have proper subtitles embedded within it. Right now my only viable alternative is to store a mkv version and a mp4 version and that's just a waste of space.

But it sounds like I'll have to write a converter myself, should be a "fun" project if nothing else.

[Keiyakusha]

Why would the conversion be impossible? Sure, you can't losslessly go from .ass to .ttxt, but, having looked a bit at the two formats, if all he wants is things like fonts converted over from everything I can see that would be trivial to do.
I'm saying there is no software for that. Question was about software, not a theoretical possibility. If one wants to do it by hand, good luck to him.

Ensiferous
What is you receiver for these mp4? Are you sure it will render styled TTXT with something other than simple srt-like text?

[Selur]

Just as a site note, iirc. mp4 can't embed external fonts so it always depends on the fonts installed an the system which kind of limits to possibility of ass->ttxt conversions even more,.. ;)

[Selur]

I'm do not really know much about .ass or .ttxt but here (http://forum.selur.de/topic101-asstottxt-basic-subtitle-conversion-from-ass-to-ttxt.html)'s a little converter that at least does some basic (ignoring all the advanced) stuff (win32/win64 and qt based source code). Depending on my time and motivation I'll add support for more stuff as I learn more about both formats,..

[SeeMoreDigital]

Ensiferous
What is you receiver for these mp4? Are you sure it will render styled TTXT with something other than simple srt-like text?
That's a good question...

If Ensiferous is intending to play such files via a hardware player. Support is limited to basic TTXT rendering, with no styles.