Subtitles from a VHS tape

[darth_maul]

Hi,

I have an .avi movie but I simply can not find the subtitles. In my country, this movie is only available in VHS.
Is it possible to extract subtitles from the VHS tape ?

My video card is a ATI all-in-wonder Radeon 7500.

Tks.

[oddyseus]

The only thing that u can do, is to connect your vcr in your pc's audio input, record the audio, use the wav in substation Alpha in order to actually hear and text write the subs and use the ssa script for authoring.

[JuanC]

If you're using MMC (ATi Multimedia Center) v8.1 or later you can capture the Closed Captions to an external file (only availale when capturing to ".VCR" format), it's compatible with srt format. The only issue is that MMC splits every multiline captions into separate subtitles, but using something like URUsoft's Subtitle workshop v2 or later you can combine them together manually.

Sometimes I have done this, and in order to archive the videoclips in DivX or DVD-R, I use a high bitrate like 8mbps to capture to VCR format, and then reencode to DivX or MPEG2, after "exporting" the video from "VCR" to MPEG2 using the "library" program included with MMC. Hope that helps, :J

[oddyseus]

I thought that it must be ntsc in order to have close captions embeded.

Does every vhs nowdays has close captions?

[JuanC]

Originally posted by oddyseus
I thought that it must be ntsc in order to have close captions embeded. Is that so? I never heard it was that way. So is line 21 used for CC only in NTSC an not in PAL?
Originally posted by oddyseus
Does every vhs nowdays has close captions? Not every VHS, but I have seen many, and have captured a couple of them.

[oddyseus]

the 625 lines of pal is leaving very little space for cc. My impression was solified, short of speak cause I never saw a pal laser disc bearing cc, whereas all ntsc titles were.

[McPoodle]

I heard that U.K. videotapes put closed captions on the same place in the video signal as North America. I suppose the real test would be to play the tape, turn on closed captions on the TV, and see what you get. I have no idea of MMC can extract this type of captions, though.

[Yusaku]

To extract hardcoded subs from videotape, you can also capture it to AVI and run through SubLog - it has quite nice success rate on clean sources...

[JuanC]

Originally posted by McPoodle
... I have no idea of MMC can extract this type of captions, though. Yes it does. You need to capture to the VCR proprietary ATi format (a customized mpeg2 transport stream). The external CC file will be in the same folder as the vcr file...