ANN: SubRip 1.50 b4

[zuggy]

ai4spam continues the developing of subrip, he added support for ripping subs out of avi files that contain them hardsubbed. You can download and test it - http://zuggy.wz.cz

beta 3a: LRN of TeMa=) team added experimental 3GPP Timed Text (*.ttxt) support (http://gpac.sourceforge.net/auth_text.php), without color support though.

beta 4: Bugfix release only (crash when editing a Character Matrix file)

[ai4spam]

Changes in 1.50:
Beta 1: Added whole words formatting. Added support for text formatting in subtitle window. Lots of other GUI changes. Moved to Delphi 2005 (but Delphi 7 is still supported). Speedup in processing videos when the frames are empty. Experimental Spanish language correction.
Beta 2: Fixed the detached chars problem. Fixed UniCode support to preview CodePage changes. Other bugfixes. Some changes in the video GUI. Reverted to Delphi 7, but Delphi 2005 is still supported.
Beta 3: Fixed saving bug for split subtitles. Fixed video no longer working bug. Added a progress bar for loading char matrices. Updated ortography dictionaries to UniCode.

Changes in 1.40:
Beta 1: large GUI overhaul and bugfixes; changed the format of the language and char map files to UniCode; filling a char matrix with UniCode ranges; opening bitmap sequences that DVDSupDecode outputs from converting DVB-T broadcasts saved as .sup by ProjectX; made Modify and Delete work faster for characters in the Char Matrix
Beta 2: fixed a few bugs and added an option to automatically fill the best guess; updated Portuguese language by Vítor Vieira
Beta 3: added support for negative timestamps and using the file offsets from .idx files, and fixed a few bugs

Changes in 1.30:
Beta 1: added experimental UniCode support
Beta 2: fixed a few bugs
Beta 3: fixed AviSynth support (no UniCode file names in .avs scritps)
Beta 4: fixed old character matrix format import (now the correct diacritics are selected if the CodePage is set properly)
Beta 5: fixed "black on black" bug; added experimental support for delays in .idx files (multiple delays are compounded)
Beta 6: fixed a bug when saving subtitles as UniCode instead of ANSI for some languages; GUI improvement when processing videos: show last frame of the subtitle when doing OCR, instead of the current frame
Beta 7: large overhaul of the video GUI (now tolerances are per channel); changed the detection algorithm; added text fattening to help with irregular characters
Beta 8: improved the detection algorithm: now the frame times should be correct in all but the most difficult cases; fixed a bug in the disjoint characters routine; fixed DVD Maestro saving bug
Beta 9: fixed video not showing bug; added UniCode font support (by default, Arial Unicode MS is used, if available); fixed several other bugs
Beta 10: added a Font button in the subtitle window; fixed several bugs in hard-subbed video ripping
Beta 11: fixed some GUI bugs, updated with new French language file by Kurtnoise

Changes in 1.20:
Beta 9: AVI file support; fill char matrix from matched font; best guess so far
Beta 10: speedup in avi files; moved all avi stuff to a new window, changed some things in the GUI; added Ctrl-Enter for using best guess in OCR; added Pause/Abort button in color change dialog; solved the duplicate subs problem; Zuggy solved the P4 crash problem.
Beta 11: speedup and bug fixes for video files; several GUI improvements.
Beta 12: extend selection for disjoint characters; draw blue lines between text lines
Beta 13: fill areas that touch the blue lines between text lines
Beta 14: automatic support for other video files using AviSynth.
Beta 15: support for saving subtitles as bitmaps for later subtitle removal
Beta 16: extend more than 1 character, save bitmaps as .pgm
Beta 17: minor bugfixes

A guide for ripping subtitles from videos is now available:
http://zuggy.wz.cz/redir.php?co=101

I've posted my char matrix: http://sr1.mytempdir.com/132702 or http://foxyshadis.slightlydark.com/r...CharMatrix.rar (thanks to foxyshadis)

It works for some 90% of the DVDs I've seen. Be sure to set the OCR sensitivity high (1000) when using it. See additional instructions in my post: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...590#post679590

[unskinnyboy]

Hardcoded subs from AVI? Wow. This is great news. Thanks! Installing 1.2b now.

[smiller667]

Thank you for the great news ... I'll try the hardsub-ripping soon.

Steve

[niamh]

This is great!

[E-Male]

gotta try this one

[ai4spam]

Thanks, guys, feedback and bug reports will be appreciated.
I'm currently working on it, so check back to the website often, there may be new betas for download.
I'll try to make a HowTo guide for it also.

[ai4spam]

Oh, and ti will work with anything MediaPlayer can play (mpg, ogm, you name it), except that in MediaPlayer mode (as oppposed to simple Avi mode) the area where the movie is displayed has to be on top, with no other windows over it, and there is no way it can tell the frame rate.

[ai4spam]

Here's a first try at a "manual" for the new features, extracted from the updated documentation:


II - OCR Process

...
If SubRip already has a character that it thinks is close to the
current one, it will display it on top of the window, as the "best
guess". To use it (including the font style), just press the "Use"
button. A new character will be inserted in the character matrix,
just as if you typed it manually.
...


5) If you think you recognize the font that the subtitles use, you can
try to generate all the characters automatically, instead of typing
them one by one. Press the "Fill Matrix From Text" button. In the
window that appears, first type one of the lines of text in the
image, then use the buttons to adjust the text position, size and
angle so that it overlaps exactly with the text in the image. Try
changing the font size and style to improve the match (if you select
italics or bold, the styles will also show up in the character
matrix). When done, press "Done" to continue. If the match is not
perfect, or the OCR tolerance is too high, SubRip may not recognize
the newly-inserted characters, and just show you a best guess. If it
matches, press the "Use" button, and the current character will be
introduced in the character matrix.

...

IX - Ripping SubTitles from video files

Some video files have SubTitles "burned into them". SubRip can be used
to extract subtitles from video files as follows.

1) Open the video file by selecting "Open Hard Subbed Video Files" from
the "File" menu. SubRip will try to open any file that MediaPlayer can
play, but it can only detect the frame rate of .avi files.

2) The movie will start playing in the video window. Wait until you see
a subtitle, or use the track bar in the "Video control panel" or the
edit box to advance to another frame. Press the "Pause" button to stop
the movie from playing when you see a subtitle.

3) In the movie window, click INSIDE a character (the white area) so
that SubRip can detect the subtitle color and width. Look in the panel
to confirm: the detected colors should match what you see in the video
window. If not, click again. The "text line width" box should show
values between 1 and 5. Anything larger would probably mean that
detection was unsuccessful. If after several tries, the detection still
does not seem to work, try lowering the "text color tolerance".

4) In the movie window, right-click and drag to define the region inside
which the detection takes place. The smaller the region, the faster it
will work. The region should completely enclose the subtitles, and have
a generous margin of at least the width of the text line and outline
combined. Be careful for cases when there are more lines in the
subtitle. You can always stop processing and redefine the region by
right-clicking and dragging.

5) Check the "View" check box. In the main window, a rectangle the size
of the selected region should show up, with the subtitles in white and
the outline in red. If the subtitles have outlines (they mostly do),
also check the "Use" check box.

7) If the subtitles do not show up properly (the lines are too thin),
try playing with the text line and outline widths and increasing the
tolerances. Ideally, even on a bright background, you should only see
the text and the outline. If large bright areas also show up, try
checking the "Try to fill open areas" and "Try to fill large areas"
check boxes. Do not use them unless you have to, they slow down the
recognition process.

8) When you are satisfied, press the "Rewind" button to go to the start
of the movie, then the "Run" button to start the OCR process. The OCR
will be similar to what you see when ripping SubTitles from DVDs. If at
any time you need to change any parameters, press the "Pause/Abort"
button.

9) If you want to change the last subtitle, press the "Back" button to
go the first frame of that subtitle in the movie.

[E-Male]

had a quick look, and all seems ok (as always with subrip)
the only thing i don't like is this:
if a windows is on top of the video it get's captured instead
so far not so bad, i guess it has a technical reason, but:
1. the control windows (with the options for the ocr from video) hardly fits between the video and the edge of the window, maybe one solution would be to allow the window to be set to fullscreen
2. the text window (showing the sub file), it always appears at the same place (partially over the video), could it be changed to remember it's last position

an other (low priority) request:
since subrip recognises the subs in the video
could it output their frame times, coordinates and bitmaps of them
if that format could be fine-tuned together with an avisynth-logo-removal-plug-in-developer [what a word] it would be possible to do high quality subtitle removing
(later a translation of the OCRed subs could be put back as hard- or soft-subs)

[ai4spam]

Thanks for the feedback.

For issue 1, indeed the reason is technical: in MediaPlayer mode it can open pretty much any file that MediaPlayer opens, but it can't draw it double-buffered. I'm changing this so that the video is in a separate window that is always on top. That will take care of issue 2 also.

The low-priority request can be done, and will be if such a developer adresses me with a request.

[ai4spam]

About the VirtualDub Plugin: there is already a plugin that pulls the subtitles in "standard" SubRip files (.sub and .idx) from video files. I haven't tested it (a friend says it only works with VirtualDub 1.5.4) and I don't know how well it deals with tough cases like white subs on white background (it seems rather simplistic, from the interface), but it may be worthwhile talking to its developer about your request:
http://www.sharemation.com/PodPis/PodPis.html

[masken]

Great news!

Still any need for "hard cases" vobsubs as reference material?

Taking my chance for a feature suggestion:
Accelerator indicators for selecting formatting wanted (Italics, Underlined, Bold, Sticky (or whatever the no-named one's named )).

Also pause/abort in the 4-color selection dialogue.

[ai4spam]

Thanks for the reply. I don't quite understand what you mean by "hard cases". About the feature suggestion: in what window? The pause/abort can be done, no problem.

I'll resume work at the end of this week. Meanwhile, if he has time, Zuggy will try to solve the crash bug on P4.

[Endzeit]

ai4spam,

you're definitely a genius!
Never heard of this program before, d/l'ed it and gave it a try - OCRing hardcoded subs is an amazing approach!

Thanks a bunch for all the effort you put into this great piece of software.

[niamh]

I have a feature request if that's possible .. I love the best guess button, but it gets it wrong half the time, so I end up moving the mouse up and down to fill the letter in or click best guess (in the end, I just fill the letters in). Would it be possible to make an option saying "press enter on the empty box will automatically enter best guess in the matrix" (if that's english). This way it would be even faster and easier

I have an idx here that won't be ocred at all with any app, I tried fiddling with the detection thresholds with no joy, if anyone wants it to improve ocr detection I can upload it.
I think masken meant those, idx files that won't be ocred properly no matter what.

[smiller667]

If you can up it somewhere, I'd like to take a look ... just out of curiosity.

Steve

[castellanos]

Hi!
I'll give a try, but I would like to know if an old bug is fixed it:
When saving subs in srt text mode, SubRip makes no difference between "I" and "l" then, for example, the word "Golf" comes like this: "GoIf" and so on with the rest of the "l"s...
Somebody noticed that problem?
Greetings!

[niamh]

subs

Have fun

[E-Male]

Originally posted by castellanos
Hi!
I'll give a try, but I would like to know if an old bug is fixed it:
When saving subs in srt text mode, SubRip makes no difference between "I" and "l" then, for example, the word "Golf" comes like this: "GoIf" and so on with the rest of the "l"s...
Somebody noticed that problem?
Greetings!

have you tried the 'postproccessing'? [don't remember the exact name of the feature]