A plea for a blu-ray (.sup) subtitle filter

[djloewen]

We over at the subtitle board are in desperate need of a new Avisynth filter. We currently have no way encoding blu-rays with the subtitles displayed as they were actually meant to be - the only current options (that I am aware of) are to OCR, or to downconvert them to .IDX for VSfilter.

We are currently able to demux the subtitles as a .sup stream (which seems to be basically the blu-ray equivalent to DVD's idx/sub?). If anyone here has the skill, and would be willing to write a filter to display such a stream as-is, you would be doing the video-encoding community a great service!

[Adub]

What exactly do you mean? BD-Rebuilder should produce Blurays with with the subtitles displayed as they were actually meant to be. Besides, soft subbing will result in a greater quality encode anyways, so why hardsub?

If you are worried about play ability, I believe that Media Player Classic supports Bluray subtitles, and has for a while.

[djloewen]

To give an example of a possible use for this, I'll explain what I want to do personally.

I'd like to rip and encode my blu-ray collection as .mkv files. I want to be able to play these .mkv files "anywhere", meaning not only on my computer, but also on media-capable set-top boxes, as well as theoretical handheld devices capable of playing relatively high-bitrate files (I'm expecting these to be around by Christmas). So I certainly can't rely on Meda Player Classic's capabilities, and BD-rebuilder isn't useful to me since I want .mkvs, not discs (unless I misunderstand BD-rebuilder's capabilities).

As to why I would want hard-coded subs in the first place, here are 4 reasons (in order from weakest to strongest):

1.) I am a bit of a perfectionist, and I like the subs to look exactly as they were originally intended (colors/font etc).
2.) I'm not a fan of OCR, it can do a decent job but I get frustrated by the errors that often remain.
3.) For forced subs I would never want them off in the first place, so I might as well hard-code them (quality issues aside).
4.) As I mentioned, I want these files to be compatible with any device that can play H.264/mkv, without having to worry about subtitle filters. For me, this reason trumps all counter-arguments.

Quality isn't so much a concern for me, since I don't care about the final filesize, I'm happy to throw more bits at it to make it look pretty even with the hard subs.

[Adub]

Ah, okay. Excellent argument.

Well, for your reasons, I am going to have to agree with you on that one. The only problem is that the Bluray spec is so new that we don't have all of the tools and features that we need when we need them. The only thing that I can think of is to convert to DVD sub/idx using BDSup2Sub and then see if you can hardcode that using VSFilter. You may have some troubles with the resolution, but if you use a combination of Avisynth resizers and possibly the Overlay function, you may be able to make it work.

It may not be great, but it should work.

[djloewen]

Yeah, for now that does seem to be the best solution. It's certainly not as clean-looking as the original subtitles though - especially when getting into color gradients, downgrading to the idx/sub 4-color palette isn't the most visually pleasing.

So if anyone wants to whip up a filter to handle .sup files directly... I'll send you a nice Easter basket :P

[Wilbert]

Never tried it, but have a look at: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=119390

[Blue_MiSfit]

I'm trying this right now with JCVD. I'll post results!

[Blue_MiSfit]

I got an unable to parse error...

My SUP was ripped straight from the BluRay disc, via eac3to...

???

~MiSfit

[Zachs]

I know this thread is old but in case anyone's following it still, I've just released a SUP renderer as what the OP has requested.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=148167