ANN: SubRip 1.50 b4

[zuggy]

ai4spam continues the developing of subrip, he added support for ripping subs out of avi files that contain them hardsubbed. You can download and test it - http://zuggy.wz.cz

beta 3a: LRN of TeMa=) team added experimental 3GPP Timed Text (*.ttxt) support (http://gpac.sourceforge.net/auth_text.php), without color support though.

beta 4: Bugfix release only (crash when editing a Character Matrix file)

[ai4spam]

Changes in 1.50:
Beta 1: Added whole words formatting. Added support for text formatting in subtitle window. Lots of other GUI changes. Moved to Delphi 2005 (but Delphi 7 is still supported). Speedup in processing videos when the frames are empty. Experimental Spanish language correction.
Beta 2: Fixed the detached chars problem. Fixed UniCode support to preview CodePage changes. Other bugfixes. Some changes in the video GUI. Reverted to Delphi 7, but Delphi 2005 is still supported.
Beta 3: Fixed saving bug for split subtitles. Fixed video no longer working bug. Added a progress bar for loading char matrices. Updated ortography dictionaries to UniCode.

Changes in 1.40:
Beta 1: large GUI overhaul and bugfixes; changed the format of the language and char map files to UniCode; filling a char matrix with UniCode ranges; opening bitmap sequences that DVDSupDecode outputs from converting DVB-T broadcasts saved as .sup by ProjectX; made Modify and Delete work faster for characters in the Char Matrix
Beta 2: fixed a few bugs and added an option to automatically fill the best guess; updated Portuguese language by Vítor Vieira
Beta 3: added support for negative timestamps and using the file offsets from .idx files, and fixed a few bugs

Changes in 1.30:
Beta 1: added experimental UniCode support
Beta 2: fixed a few bugs
Beta 3: fixed AviSynth support (no UniCode file names in .avs scritps)
Beta 4: fixed old character matrix format import (now the correct diacritics are selected if the CodePage is set properly)
Beta 5: fixed "black on black" bug; added experimental support for delays in .idx files (multiple delays are compounded)
Beta 6: fixed a bug when saving subtitles as UniCode instead of ANSI for some languages; GUI improvement when processing videos: show last frame of the subtitle when doing OCR, instead of the current frame
Beta 7: large overhaul of the video GUI (now tolerances are per channel); changed the detection algorithm; added text fattening to help with irregular characters
Beta 8: improved the detection algorithm: now the frame times should be correct in all but the most difficult cases; fixed a bug in the disjoint characters routine; fixed DVD Maestro saving bug
Beta 9: fixed video not showing bug; added UniCode font support (by default, Arial Unicode MS is used, if available); fixed several other bugs
Beta 10: added a Font button in the subtitle window; fixed several bugs in hard-subbed video ripping
Beta 11: fixed some GUI bugs, updated with new French language file by Kurtnoise

Changes in 1.20:
Beta 9: AVI file support; fill char matrix from matched font; best guess so far
Beta 10: speedup in avi files; moved all avi stuff to a new window, changed some things in the GUI; added Ctrl-Enter for using best guess in OCR; added Pause/Abort button in color change dialog; solved the duplicate subs problem; Zuggy solved the P4 crash problem.
Beta 11: speedup and bug fixes for video files; several GUI improvements.
Beta 12: extend selection for disjoint characters; draw blue lines between text lines
Beta 13: fill areas that touch the blue lines between text lines
Beta 14: automatic support for other video files using AviSynth.
Beta 15: support for saving subtitles as bitmaps for later subtitle removal
Beta 16: extend more than 1 character, save bitmaps as .pgm
Beta 17: minor bugfixes

A guide for ripping subtitles from videos is now available:
http://zuggy.wz.cz/redir.php?co=101

I've posted my char matrix: http://sr1.mytempdir.com/132702 or http://foxyshadis.slightlydark.com/random/CharMatrix.rar (thanks to foxyshadis)

It works for some 90% of the DVDs I've seen. Be sure to set the OCR sensitivity high (1000) when using it. See additional instructions in my post: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=679590#post679590

[unskinnyboy]

Hardcoded subs from AVI? Wow. This is great news. Thanks! Installing 1.2b now. :)

[smiller667]

Thank you for the great news ... I'll try the hardsub-ripping soon.

Steve

[niamh]

This is great!

[E-Male]

gotta try this one

[ai4spam]

Thanks, guys, feedback and bug reports will be appreciated.
I'm currently working on it, so check back to the website often, there may be new betas for download.
I'll try to make a HowTo guide for it also.

[ai4spam]

Oh, and ti will work with anything MediaPlayer can play (mpg, ogm, you name it), except that in MediaPlayer mode (as oppposed to simple Avi mode) the area where the movie is displayed has to be on top, with no other windows over it, and there is no way it can tell the frame rate.

[ai4spam]

Here's a first try at a "manual" for the new features, extracted from the updated documentation:


II - OCR Process

...
If SubRip already has a character that it thinks is close to the
current one, it will display it on top of the window, as the "best
guess". To use it (including the font style), just press the "Use"
button. A new character will be inserted in the character matrix,
just as if you typed it manually.
...


5) If you think you recognize the font that the subtitles use, you can
try to generate all the characters automatically, instead of typing
them one by one. Press the "Fill Matrix From Text" button. In the
window that appears, first type one of the lines of text in the
image, then use the buttons to adjust the text position, size and
angle so that it overlaps exactly with the text in the image. Try
changing the font size and style to improve the match (if you select
italics or bold, the styles will also show up in the character
matrix). When done, press "Done" to continue. If the match is not
perfect, or the OCR tolerance is too high, SubRip may not recognize
the newly-inserted characters, and just show you a best guess. If it
matches, press the "Use" button, and the current character will be
introduced in the character matrix.

...

IX - Ripping SubTitles from video files

Some video files have SubTitles "burned into them". SubRip can be used
to extract subtitles from video files as follows.

1) Open the video file by selecting "Open Hard Subbed Video Files" from
the "File" menu. SubRip will try to open any file that MediaPlayer can
play, but it can only detect the frame rate of .avi files.

2) The movie will start playing in the video window. Wait until you see
a subtitle, or use the track bar in the "Video control panel" or the
edit box to advance to another frame. Press the "Pause" button to stop
the movie from playing when you see a subtitle.

3) In the movie window, click INSIDE a character (the white area) so
that SubRip can detect the subtitle color and width. Look in the panel
to confirm: the detected colors should match what you see in the video
window. If not, click again. The "text line width" box should show
values between 1 and 5. Anything larger would probably mean that
detection was unsuccessful. If after several tries, the detection still
does not seem to work, try lowering the "text color tolerance".

4) In the movie window, right-click and drag to define the region inside
which the detection takes place. The smaller the region, the faster it
will work. The region should completely enclose the subtitles, and have
a generous margin of at least the width of the text line and outline
combined. Be careful for cases when there are more lines in the
subtitle. You can always stop processing and redefine the region by
right-clicking and dragging.

5) Check the "View" check box. In the main window, a rectangle the size
of the selected region should show up, with the subtitles in white and
the outline in red. If the subtitles have outlines (they mostly do),
also check the "Use" check box.

7) If the subtitles do not show up properly (the lines are too thin),
try playing with the text line and outline widths and increasing the
tolerances. Ideally, even on a bright background, you should only see
the text and the outline. If large bright areas also show up, try
checking the "Try to fill open areas" and "Try to fill large areas"
check boxes. Do not use them unless you have to, they slow down the
recognition process.

8) When you are satisfied, press the "Rewind" button to go to the start
of the movie, then the "Run" button to start the OCR process. The OCR
will be similar to what you see when ripping SubTitles from DVDs. If at
any time you need to change any parameters, press the "Pause/Abort"
button.

9) If you want to change the last subtitle, press the "Back" button to
go the first frame of that subtitle in the movie.

[E-Male]

had a quick look, and all seems ok (as always with subrip)
the only thing i don't like is this:
if a windows is on top of the video it get's captured instead
so far not so bad, i guess it has a technical reason, but:
1. the control windows (with the options for the ocr from video) hardly fits between the video and the edge of the window, maybe one solution would be to allow the window to be set to fullscreen
2. the text window (showing the sub file), it always appears at the same place (partially over the video), could it be changed to remember it's last position

an other (low priority) request:
since subrip recognises the subs in the video
could it output their frame times, coordinates and bitmaps of them
if that format could be fine-tuned together with an avisynth-logo-removal-plug-in-developer [what a word] it would be possible to do high quality subtitle removing
(later a translation of the OCRed subs could be put back as hard- or soft-subs)

[ai4spam]

Thanks for the feedback.

For issue 1, indeed the reason is technical: in MediaPlayer mode it can open pretty much any file that MediaPlayer opens, but it can't draw it double-buffered. I'm changing this so that the video is in a separate window that is always on top. That will take care of issue 2 also.

The low-priority request can be done, and will be if such a developer adresses me with a request.

[ai4spam]

About the VirtualDub Plugin: there is already a plugin that pulls the subtitles in "standard" SubRip files (.sub and .idx) from video files. I haven't tested it (a friend says it only works with VirtualDub 1.5.4) and I don't know how well it deals with tough cases like white subs on white background (it seems rather simplistic, from the interface), but it may be worthwhile talking to its developer about your request:
http://www.sharemation.com/PodPis/PodPis.html

[masken]

Great news! :)

Still any need for "hard cases" vobsubs as reference material?

Taking my chance for a feature suggestion:
Accelerator indicators for selecting formatting wanted (Italics, Underlined, Bold, Sticky (or whatever the no-named one's named ;))).

Also pause/abort in the 4-color selection dialogue.

[ai4spam]

Thanks for the reply. I don't quite understand what you mean by "hard cases". About the feature suggestion: in what window? The pause/abort can be done, no problem.

I'll resume work at the end of this week. Meanwhile, if he has time, Zuggy will try to solve the crash bug on P4.

[Endzeit]

ai4spam,

you're definitely a genius!
Never heard of this program before, d/l'ed it and gave it a try - OCRing hardcoded subs is an amazing approach!

Thanks a bunch for all the effort you put into this great piece of software.

[niamh]

I have a feature request if that's possible .. I love the best guess button, but it gets it wrong half the time, so I end up moving the mouse up and down to fill the letter in or click best guess (in the end, I just fill the letters in). Would it be possible to make an option saying "press enter on the empty box will automatically enter best guess in the matrix" (if that's english). This way it would be even faster and easier :)

I have an idx here that won't be ocred at all with any app, I tried fiddling with the detection thresholds with no joy, if anyone wants it to improve ocr detection I can upload it. :)
I think masken meant those, idx files that won't be ocred properly no matter what.

[smiller667]

If you can up it somewhere, I'd like to take a look ... just out of curiosity.

Steve

[castellanos]

Hi!
I'll give a try, but I would like to know if an old bug is fixed it:
When saving subs in srt text mode, SubRip makes no difference between "I" and "l" then, for example, the word "Golf" comes like this: "GoIf" and so on with the rest of the "l"s...
Somebody noticed that problem?
Greetings! ;)

[niamh]

subs (http://c.1asphost.com/niaomalley/casshern.7z)

Have fun ;)

[E-Male]

Originally posted by castellanos
Hi!
I'll give a try, but I would like to know if an old bug is fixed it:
When saving subs in srt text mode, SubRip makes no difference between "I" and "l" then, for example, the word "Golf" comes like this: "GoIf" and so on with the rest of the "l"s...
Somebody noticed that problem?
Greetings! ;)
have you tried the 'postproccessing'? [don't remember the exact name of the feature]

[ai4spam]

Thanks everybody for the replies.

@Endzeit: Thanks for the complement. AviSubDetector ( http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=89802 ) does the same thing and has TONS of options, but is hard to use (the interface is just horrendous) and makes lots of mistakes. SubRipAvi will hopefully work just as well or better, and be easier to use.

@niamh: Pressing Enter in the edit box by default means an empty char, and you can use it for skipping over characters that are too small and the like. I guess I could put a checkbox to give you the choice of having functionality you want. About that .idx file, try not using all the colors, sometimes it helps.

@smiller667: The beta version is already up on the official site mentioned in the first post. Now I'm working on improving the speed and accuracy of the detection.

@castellanos: Use the "Post-OCR correction" facility in the text window (there's a button and a menu option, your choice). Also, you can use URUSoft's Subtitle Workshop ( http://www.urusoft.net/downloads.php?lang=1 ) to correct many other OCR mistakes. You can even use the corrector in MS Word for that (Subtitle Workshop can do it for you).

@E-male: There is a subtitle and logo remover filter for VirtualDub, check out http://www.compression.ru/video/subtitles_removal/src/msu_delogo.zip

[zuggy]

Originally posted by castellanos
...if an old bug is fixed it...


How could be fixed (primary) ocred I&l letters if their "pictures" are frequently totally equal?

[masken]

Originally posted by ai4spam
Thanks for the reply. I don't quite understand what you mean by "hard cases". About the feature suggestion: in what window? The pause/abort can be done, no problem.

I'll resume work at the end of this week. Meanwhile, if he has time, Zuggy will try to solve the crash bug on P4.
The pause/abort is when selecting colors. If you've got a "hard case" you end up in a "catch 22" there, and have to use Ctrl+Alt+Del to be able to end the application.

For accelerator indicators, I mean the OCR-process window, where you work with the subs OCR:ing them. It would be very nice to be able to perform an OCR just using the keyboard and accelerator indicators (ie; alt+i to switch Italics on/off), ie; no mouse operations or 4-times tabbing + space to reach the Italics checkbox :)

About "hard cases", I've previously sent Zuggy examples of vobubs that has been hard or impossible to perform OCR on using SubRip. If there's still need for such examples, I can send more :)

btw; I forgot the most sought-after feature suggestion of them all :D The "Expand/Reduce selection" feature, similar to the one in Gabest's SubResync, for extending/reducing a selection in the image/letter being OCR'd.

oh, came up with yet another one ;) How about a "Only allow whole words to be formatted" feature in the post-OCR correction settings? I often find that when working with formatted subs (italics etc), some letters are sometimes OCR'd with the wrong formatting, making the subs actually quite alot larger (and harder to read/post-OCR fix) because of all the <i></i>'s. If one could limit formatting to whole words instead of single letters, this problem would be gone. Also note that Subtitle Workshop can't handle this, SW only handles formatting on a per-dialogue basis (and actually destroys the formatting to this state too if you open/save a sub in SW).

EDIT #4 :D
Another, low-prio feature suggestion is Regular Expressions support in the post-OCR correction. Would be neat to have a script-file much like in SW where you could specify how the post-OCR should be performed using RegEx. Ie; have an open-format type of post-OCR correction (including the default one). Low prio for me as this feature is already available in SW.

Last but not least, a HUGE THANK YOU for keeping up development of the absolutely best OCR application available for subtitles! http://www.home.no/masken/other/smilies/honorhim.gif

[smiller667]

@ai4spam: thanks, looks promising. I'll report back.

@niamh: The subs are not soo hard to OCR - edit the colours to remove all background and antialisasing colours and set the OCR difference threshold a bit lower, perhaps 700. Distinguishing italics and plain text is tricky, though. I'd probably ignore all text attributes and set the few lines in italics manually afterwards.

Steve

[johner23]

I have tried your program to extract some hardburned subtitles from an avi ( as I did using ASD, another great tool too ) and have the same problems related in the link above:

---> http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?threadid=93986

Any way to solve this?

Thanks.

devil (johner)

[ai4spam]

@masken: Great suggestions. Will work on them (the expand/reduce selection is next on the agenda). Whole words may take a bit, since there are all these output formats that are supported independently :(. Please do send me (email) some hard cases, with a line or two of explanations.

@johner23: Yes, SubRipAvi already has duplicate removal, but only for .avi subtitles. It removes subs that are IDENTICAL and have 1 frame distance between them I guess I should also remove subs that have 0 frames distance between them. It'll be trivial to make it work for DVD subtitles also.

[yaz]

yep ... that 'whole word only' thing would be great. not a big deal as it can be easily corrected even w/the most basic editor but quite annoying when occurs.

another clue. i've never ever been able to define a good color palette, so i don't know how to cope w/'soft-looking' subs. ye know, white letters outlined w/light grey on grey background, or such. ripping such subs makes practically retyping the whole subs as subrip skips complete line very frequently. so. would it be possible to implement sg like 'loading predefined color schemes', (say, black and white, or so). it'd be quite beneficial for simpletons like me.

thx a lot for your worx
y

[niamh]

@ Ai4spam and smiller : thx for the tip :)

[ai4spam]

@yaz: Unfortunately, as far as I know, each DVD has its own pallette, so predefined schemes won't work. One thing that could be done is to redo the binarization part of the algorithm. Right now it takes at most 4 out of 16 colors into consideration. Maybe some tolerance in color is also necessary. Anonther solution would be to click manually on each color, just as with hard-subbed videos. However, this is not exactly my area, I only work on the hard-subbed videos part and just occasionally dabble elsewhere, when it is easy enough to understand.

[masken]

@ai4spam, sent u a pm

Also came up with another feature that really should be in subrip; built-in UnRAR.dll routine (http://www.rarlabs.com/rar_add.htm). Subrip really should be able to unRAR .sub's in an .idx/.sub set as it's very popular to RAR the .sub when you backup as XviD's.

[ai4spam]

I can't access your website, please mail me the subs instead (@gmail).
unRAR is not on my list of priorities, there are tons of other improvements that are more important.

[ai4spam]

Beta 10 is up on the website.
Changes:
- speedup in avi files (but still a lot to do)
- moved all avi stuff to a new window, changed some things in the GUI
- added Ctrl-Enter for using best guess in OCR
- added Pause/Abort button in color change dialog
- possibly solved the duplicate subs problem (can't test, someone mail me some problem subs @gmail)

@masken: shortcuts are already available for formatting, use Ctrl-I, Ctrl-B and so on, while the cursor is inside the edit box. Can't use Alt- because that shifts the focus away from the edit box. Besides, Ctrl- is the standard key used in other applications (Word, etc.).

[yaz]

Originally posted by ai4spam
... as far as I know, each DVD has its own pallette, so predefined schemes won't work ... yep ... that's what i've been afraid of ;)
thx for the new release (it's getting better and better)
y

[masken]

@ai4spam, would it be possible to add ToolTip texts to the shortcuts (Ctrl + I) etc? Perhaps also underline the letter for each accelerator indicator (Italic etc)?

[ai4spam]

Beta 11 is available now. Tons of bugfixes and improvements, including some of the things requested here.
Video file support is about as fast and as good as I can make it. Of course, additional heuristics are possible, but I probably won't be implementing them (no time :( ). I'll only deal with bug reports and some features that I think are worth implementing, but I'll be happy to explain what I did if someone wants to continue.
It still misses some subtitles sometimes, in very hard cases (like, a sub disappears, and the very next frame, everything is white where the subtitles were). This doesn't happen very often (2 times in the movie I tested). When it does happen, stop processing, go to the first frame of the subtitle and play with the settings until it looks just right. That solved the problem in my case.
It seems to confuse a lot italics and regular characters, so just make everything regular if possible, otherwise you'll need to crank up the OCR sensitivity and pretty much end up typing the whole subtitle.

[ai4spam]

A request I received via email, and my reply:

ai4spam, thanks for all the improvements to SubRip!
They are appreciated by me and many others.

Would it be possible to modify the "Open Hard Subbed Video Files" feature so that you could open VOBs on a DVD? You would choose VTS_01_1.vob on the DVD and it would automatically VTS_01_1.vob, VTS_01_2.vob, etc (kind of like the "Open VOB(s)" feature but for hardcoded subtitles).

I have some DVDs with hardcoded subtitles that I would like to rip.

Hmm, I'm not sure, but it should work already: if you have the MPEG2 video splitter/filters installed (i.e., if you can play DVDs in MediaPlayer and other generic players like ViPlay, but NOT DVD players like CyberLink PowerDVD), then it should simply open them. It won't be able to detect the frame rate, so you'll have to input it manually. Also, you'll need to resize the video window so that you can see the subtitles in it.

Please try it out and let me know if it works. I don't know how it deals with encryption, try opening the movie with a DVD player first, to authenticate. Also, the MPEG2 splitter may only be able to deal with separate VOBs, not with an entire IFO, so you may need to open them one by one and join the subs manually later.

On another note, I just tried an .ogm file, and although it works with MediaPlayer, it refuses to work within SubRip. I guess it's Delphi's fault, I'll try to find another way to deal with this. SubtitleWorkshop works fine, so I guess there is a solution. I wrote DeK about it, waiting for his reply.

-ai4spam

[ai4spam]

Beta 12 is available now.

Changes:
- Introduced the "extend right and left" feature, which allows you to take disjoint characters as one. Technical details follow ;). It only lets you do it once, so you can't get more than 2 disjoint parts together. Don't abuse it, once you designate a character as part of such a pair, it will always be considered as such, and all subsequent pairs which contain it will need to be typed in manually. For example, if you set "in" as a group of letters, any time "i" shows up, SubRip will ask you for the pair of characters that "i" is part of, like "it", "im" and so on. This behavior is flipped if the first part of a pair ("i") is encountered at the end of a line, at which point it is overwritten as a single char, and all subsequent pairs will not be recognized until another flip is performed by setting it again as part of a pair.

I know, this sounds complicated, but I think it's easy to use. If someone from Israel can please test this with right-to-left processing, it would be great to get some feedback (I did my best, but I have no idea if it does what it's supposed to do).

- Improved the video recognizing routine, and added an option to draw lines between the text lines, to erase stray points. Its parameters are set manually, but if applied, it greatly improves the accuracy of the results. It pretty much solved the problems I had before, but it's still best to use just plain characters, instead of trying to use italics and other styles.

As specified in my previous post, the only other thing I think is worth doing right now is finding another way to play videos, to support all the formats (.ogm, .vob and so on). If I find the appropriate component, I will put it in. Otherwise, I won't have much time for other features.

While the routines are not as advanced as in AviSubDetector, and some manual tweaking is required (for example when the subtitle color and/or position change), I think the ease of use will make SubRip a good choice for ripping subtitles from hard-subbed videos.

It would be nice if someone made a tutorial on how to use the new features. I really don't have the time, and I think that if someone else makes it, it would be an opportunity to check thoroughly for functional problems. Any volunteers? Please send me an email or reply here.

[ai4spam]

Originally posted by ai4spam

Hmm, I'm not sure, but it should work already: if you have the MPEG2 video splitter/filters installed (i.e., if you can play DVDs in MediaPlayer and other generic players like ViPlay, but NOT DVD players like CyberLink PowerDVD), then it should simply open them. It won't be able to detect the frame rate, so you'll have to input it manually. Also, you'll need to resize the video window so that you can see the subtitles in it.


Well, DVDs seem to work (if you have the filters installed, as specified above, for example from http://sourceforge.net/projects/gplmpgdec ), you only need to set up the MCI extensions for .vob and .ifo to be handled by MPEGVideo2, as shown in
http://www.atlasti.com/mcisetup.shtml
.ogm files would work also, if you register the .ogm extension to MPEGVideo. Unfortunately, even if you uncheck the OGM filter option "seek only to keyframes", it won't seek to a regular frame.

The best way to use SubRip is still to rip the DVD to an .avi or a .mpg first :(.

[ai4spam]

Beta 13 is available on the official site.
Changes: minor improvement when filling "open areas", new areas are filled when drawing the lines in the spaces between subtitles.
Since nobody seems to find any serious bugs, chances are this will be declared 1.2 Final.

[ai4spam]

Continuation on ripping VOBs (question received by mail and my reply):

Hello,

These are the steps I am using to open VOB:

1) File -> Open Hard Subbed Video Files
2) Select VTS_01_1.VOB
3) I get "Cannot detect frame rate" and Input frame rate value
4) I enter frame rate value and click OK
5) I get "File opened in MediaPlayer mode. Move all windows away from the subtitle region."
6) The Video File Viewer opens but the window is all black (no picture)

Am I doing anything wrong? I installed gplmpgdec and added MCI extensions for .vob and .ifo in the registry.


Well, I'm in the process of looking for a better MediaPlayer. I'm not sure whether or not my search will be successful.
As for playing VOBs, I only tried with my AniMusic DVD, which is not encrytped. Try ripping the VOBs first with a DVD ripper, and open the decrypted VOBs from your hard drive. Also, I have not actually checked whether the GPL MPEG2 decoder works. Can you please confirm if you're able to play VOBs using mplayer.exe or mplay32.exe? If they don't work with the GPL decoder, then neither does SubRip.

I should mention that I don't know whether decrypted VOBs really work, or if they behave like OGM files and only seek to keyframes (I was too lazy to copy the files from the DVD to my HDD). Please try ripping and then let me know. Basically, you should be able to use the edit control to change the frame number, and see changes on the screen.

If you're in a hurry, the quick and dirty solution is to use a 1-pass DVD2AVI or something similar and then run SubRip on the resulting AVI.

[roux]

I’m trying to rip subs as bmp so i can import them into scenarist. Only the sst file doesn’t contain the whole header. It’s shows me only the color and contrast entry and the file names.

Color (4 1 2 3)
Contrast (15 0 15 15)
1 00:00:57:01 00:01:03:09 1.1.bmp


This results in an error importing into scenarist. Do i need to create a header myself instead?

[ai4spam]

I have no idea, but I could I look into it if you give me more details. Are you trying to export hard-subbed subtitles from a video file? That functionality is not currently supported, only avi2txt works now. If not, did it work before, with DVD subs? If it worked before, you may want to consider the possibility that Scenarist has changed, because I didn't change that part of SubRip ;). If not, what does the output format header look like (give an example)?

[roux]

Thanks for the reply,

I'm trying to rip selectable subs from a dvd as bitmaps and save the sst file. Then i want to insert the ripped subs into scenarist. Normally i use dvdmaestro, ripping the subs and save the .son file and importing them in maestro, gives me no problems.

I have an example .sst file created with maestrosbt, which imports like it should into scenarist:

st_format 2
Display_Start non_forced
TV_Type NTSC
Tape_Type NON_DROP
Pixel_Area (0 477)
Directory .
Subtitle test
Display_Area (0 2 719 479)
Contrast (15 15 15 0)

#
# Palette entries:
#
# 01 : RGB(255,255,255)
# 02 : RGB(127,127,127)
# 03 : RGB( 0, 0, 0)
#

PA (0 0 255 - - - )
E1 (255 0 0 - - - )
E2 (0 0 0 - - - )
BG (255 255 255 - - - )


SP_NUMBER START END FILE_NAME
Color (3 2 1 1)
0001 00:00:07:05 00:00:32:15 test_0001.bmp


As you can see there's more information in de .sst file, which subrip don't save.



I think i've found the answer, in this thread Oddyseus says you have to change the header. I'm going to try that.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=35450

[ai4spam]

Cool, it wasn't my area anyway. Maybe Zuggy can help you further.

[roux]

I figured it out, just had to create the same header like maestrosbt does.

[ai4spam]

Ok, so there seems to be no competent video player for Delphi that does what I want. However, there is hope: AviSynth http://www.avisynth.org/ seems to work great. I will implement automatic script generation soon, but in the meantime just create a .avs file with contents like:
DirectShowSource("D:\Rip\Vts_01_1.vob" fps=25.00)
Remember, you still need to have all the filters properly installed (i.e., the file should play in MediaPlayer). For DVDs, you probably need http://sourceforge.net/projects/gplmpgdec Apparently, DirectShow does not require filters to provide accurate frame seeking, but most of them do, and when they do, AviSynth takes advantage of it, so most files should work.
OGM files also seem to work, although it seems that seeking backwards is only done until the last keyframe. After setting the color settings though, since now SubRip only goes forward, it shouldn't be a problem.

[E-Male]

better use DGMPGDec
it's made for dvd/mpeg2 n avisynth

[GrofLuigi]

a bug: the rectangle "drawn" with right mouse button doesn't stay in place. As soon as I click on something else (mostly the buttons-gadgets for thresholds), it returns to the previous position. (maybe this has to do something with the source, avisynth'd and cropped)

a feature request: Also, the rectangle cannot be drawn by dragging in bottom-right to top-left direction (message: range check error). This is sometimes needed when the bottom-right corner has better visual indication.

another feature request (low priority): inter-line height to be able to be bigger than 40.

a community "please": some good values for thresholds (or tutorial, as mentioned). No matter what I do, I end up with subrip recognizing only parts of letters (too thinned) or ugly big areas (the two fill options don't help). The source is very clean, BTW.

thankyous: to the authors of the program. :)

GL

[ai4spam]

a bug: the rectangle "drawn" with right mouse button doesn't stay in place. As soon as I click on something else (mostly the buttons-gadgets for thresholds), it returns to the previous position. (maybe this has to do something with the source, avisynth'd and cropped)

I can't reproduce this. Hopefully, it will all go away once I start supporting AviSynth and not MediaPlayer.


a feature request: Also, the rectangle cannot be drawn by dragging in bottom-right to top-left direction (message: range check error). This is sometimes needed when the bottom-right corner has better visual indication.

another feature request (low priority): inter-line height to be able to be bigger than 40.

Sure, it will be done.


a community "please": some good values for thresholds (or tutorial, as mentioned). No matter what I do, I end up with subrip recognizing only parts of letters (too thinned) or ugly big areas (the two fill options don't help).

Well, in my case it's a combination of everything: text color and outline color tolerance, filling. Beta 13 introduced some stuff to help with the big ugly areas (most of which should disappear when you click "use outline"), namely drawing lines between the text lines and filling the open areas from there. Also, keep in mind that "large" means that the width or the height is more than 10 times the text line width, so if that is detected incorrectly (max=10), then only areas of more than 10*10=100 in width or height will be filled. The value 10 came from the fact that the widest letter (W) and the tallest letter (E) have some less than 10 lines forming them. Basically, you need to manually lower the text line witdth to the point where text is still detected correctly, but large areas are filled. I'll change it to work better when the height of the text is set in the inter-line options panel.
Everybody, please post your successful setting combinations. And I'm still waiting for someone to volunteer to write a tutorial ;).


The source is very clean, BTW.
thankyous: to the authors of the program. :)

Well, the point was to make it easy to understand. SubRip has enough parts that I had a hard time unraveling myself, I saw no point in adding to that ;).
And you're welcome, it's nice to be appreciated ;).

[ai4spam]

Beta 14 is up on the official website.
Changes:
- GUI improvements and changes in the video routine
- added AviSynth support for files other than regular AVIs

I have one more feature on my list: output BMPs with the recognized text (so only what was actually typed in or recognized shows up) and a text file with frame numbers, coordinates and file names, for possible subtitle elimination. Someone willing to write a VirtualDub filter to use the results?