Vobsub Subtitle Playback Formatting

[MrAyanami]

Hi,

First off, this is my first post here although I have been using these forums as lot to help me with various media related problems, so please forgive any stupid mistakes I make. I have also tried searching to find a solution before I posted but couldn't find an answer.

I have several .MKV files that contain Vobsub subtitles. I don't know if it is relevant but they are anime, I prefer to listen to the Japanese audio and have English subtitles.

My current set up is Media Player Classic, FFDShow, VSFilter and Halli Media Splitter.

Up until now I have only had to deal with hardcoded AVI's and softcoded OGM files and for the OGM's I have simply altered the font in VSFilter and the onscreen font changes. I need a fairly large font as I view them on a TV across the room.

My problem is that I can not find a way to alter the Vobsub format subtitles no matter what I try. I did some searching and the Halli Media Splitter has a scaling option but this seems to have no effect on the size of the subtitles.

I have even tried to extract the subtitles using MKVExtractGUI in the hopes I could then convert it to SRT and do it the old fashioned way but when I extract the stream it just comes out as gibberish.

If anyone could offer any advice on how I can increase Vobsub suibtitle size it would be much appreciated.

Thank you

[Milvus]

It's true that currently, there is no way to easily change the font size of a ssa subtitle stream inside a player.

The only way is indeed to demux the file, reauthor the ssa (with a program like aegisub, or directly in notepad) and remux everything (you can also keep the original MKV and leave the ssa as an external file).

So we must concentrate on the demux step. What kind of gibberish exactly do you obtain ? Does it look like still a bit like a ssa/ass file or not at all ? What the size of the file ? Is it unicode ?

[EDIT : it seems you realize they were not ssa but rather vobsub subtitles. So it's even more complex : you will have to convert them by OCR and of course check for typos. But it will be SRT files then. Still a lot of work...]

[MrAyanami]

First off thank you for you reply, and yes, although one thing told me they were SSA, when I actually try to extract them it says they are Vobsub. Sorry for the confusion.

I am getting a .idx and a .sub out of the mkv, I am then trying to use Subtitle Workshop to convert them. But it just says the file is corrupt.

[Milvus]

With the VobSub format, *.sub files are juste a bunch of RLE bitmaps, so it's normal you can't read them like text files.

But the main problem here, is that it does not look like an complete sub. There is only ~35 lines of dialogs. An average 24min episode should have 10 times that. And they are concentrated in the beginning and ending of the episode (for the OP and ED ?). You should see if they are more subtitles streams in your file.

PS : I'm not sure, but I think posting these links on this board is a rule infringment (copyrighted material). You'd better remove them. And I certainly hope you got your MKV file through legit way, if not, the mods will certainly close this thread.

[MrAyanami]

I have removed the links now, thank you very much for your help. I even worked out how to use Subrip to do the darn OCR.

And yes, don't worry, the files are 100% legal.

Thank you again for all your help

[manusse]

Also, you can use SubtitleCreator to edit your VobSub subtitles (especially their position and their colors). Use the Tools -> Manipulate ... menu.

Cheers
Manusse

[MrAyanami]

For some reason I could not get the OCR to work on these darn subtitles, I could get it to work on others but just not these.

In the end I tried another method, I extracted the subtitles again and simply altered the scaling in the idx files. I then just remuxed them and it worked (to my amazement).

Thank you again for the help Milvus and manusse.