How do .sub- and .idx-files work?

[tominator]

Ive got some subtitle files sent to me in a format I havnt used before. There are two files, one .sub and one .idx.

I tried to edit them by opening them in Subtitle Workshop which doesnt work. I then tried to open them in notepad which worked but gave me a whole lot of bogus characters.

This lead me to believe that this might not be text-based subformat and after comparing the subs to those on the actual DVD I started wondering if it could actually be the sub-pictures from the DVD that were stored in the .sub and .idx.

Am I somewhat correct? If not could someone please tell me how these files work and if I can edit them?

[ilovejedd]

Yes you are correct. VobSub can correct timings and stuff but if you want to edit the actual text, you'll have to convert from sub/idx to a text based subtitle format using OCR software such as SubRip, etc. I'm not sure if Subtitle Workshop can do the same.

[tominator]

Yes you are correct. VobSub can correct timings and stuff but if you want to edit the actual text, you'll have to convert from sub/idx to a text based subtitle format using OCR software such as SubRip, etc. I'm not sure if Subtitle Workshop can do the same.

Thanks a lot.

SubRip can do it but Subtitle Workshop doesnt do OCR at all.

[manusse]

You can try to convert them to srt using SubtitleCreator if you have Office 2003 installed.
You can also edit them (change colors, suppress some subtitles) using SubtitleCreator.
You can also chose to convert them to the .sup format using SubtitleCreator. It is also a bitmap format but you can then OCR them with DVDSubEdit.

Cheers
Manusse