Accessing SDH subtitles

[beandog]

Does anyone know of any tools for Linux systems that can access SDH subtitles? I have a few titles, both movies and TV shows, that have these subtitles. It seems like they are replacing CC subtitles.

[setarip_old]

Hi!

From what I've seen (on Blu-ray discs) The "SDH" subtitles are simply contained in a separate standard subtitle stream - and can be accessed in exactly the same way you access standard subtitle streams...

[beandog]

My bad, I should have clarified that I meant DVDs. :)

[Inspector.Gadget]

Are they listed with a button on the regular subtitles menu when you watch the DVD? If so, treat them like normal subtitles.

[beandog]

Are they listed with a button on the regular subtitles menu when you watch the DVD? If so, treat them like normal subtitles.

No, I haven't seen anything that can even recognize them.

[Inspector.Gadget]

How do you know they're on the DVD? DVD subs come in two flavors: regular old RLE subtitles that for example on Windows can be OCR'd with Subrip to SRT, and closed captions muxed into the video stream that are passed to a player's Line 21 decoder and can be dumped to SRT (as they are already plain text) on Windows with something like CCextractor. If the subs in question aren't listed on the disc, how do you know they exist?

[beandog]

How do you know they're on the DVD?

Product packaging.

Murder, She Wrote comes to mind. The first few seasons all have closed captioning on them, then on previous seasons it says English SDH instead.

They all have VobSub subtitles though, so that particular example isn't a problem, but there are some DVD movies that only have English SDH, and not VobSub. I can't think of any movie examples off the top of my head though.

I can get Closed Captioning just fine though ... watch them with MPlayer, rip them with Handbrake, or extract them with ccextractor, all on Linux.

[beandog]

DVD subs come in two flavors: regular old RLE subtitles that for example on Windows can be OCR'd with Subrip to SRT, and closed captions muxed into the video stream that are passed to a player's Line 21 decoder and can be dumped to SRT (as they are already plain text) on Windows with something like CCextractor.

Maybe I'm asking the wrong question. Maybe I should be asking, what are SDH subtitles? Because I have a lot of DVDs that mention those as the ones on there. Generally everytime I've seen them, it replaces the little [cc] logo.

[Inspector.Gadget]

English SDH describes the function - English dialogue plus sound effect, music, etc. captions, creating Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing that expand upon the lines a person hearing the actors speak would want to see printed. They are commonly encoded as regular DVD subtitles and can be extracted to Vobsub, OCR;d to SRT, etc. exactly as non-SDH subs.

[beandog]

English SDH describes the function - English dialogue plus sound effect, music, etc. captions, creating Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing that expand upon the lines a person hearing the actors speak would want to see printed. They are commonly encoded as regular DVD subtitles and can be extracted to Vobsub, OCR;d to SRT, etc. exactly as non-SDH subs.

Okay, that makes sense, I guess. So they are just standard subtitles with extras added?

I know I've seen some Blu-Rays that will list available subtitles as "English, English SDH" separately. What does that mean?

[Inspector.Gadget]

So they are just standard subtitles with extras added?

Yes. The type of encoding used is exactly the same, but there are additional words included in the stream.

I know I've seen some Blu-Rays that will list available subtitles as "English, English SDH" separately. What does that mean?

Blu-rays will often have ordinary English subs and then an English SDH sub that adds the same sort of noise, music, etc. captions you'd find on a DVD SDH sub. It's less common for a DVD to have both though they do exist.