Discussion Forums > Technology

Subtitle Extraction from ISO

(1/2) > >>

Triltaison:
I'm looking to extract the subtitle tracks from a few ISO files, but I'm pretty unfamiliar with this territory. Converting to ASS or some kind of text file would be great, since I'm hoping to translate them and it would be much handier to have them all laid out instead of having to pause the video every two seconds. I don't need to do anything fancy like preserve styles or timing, just rip the text itself.

Does anyone know of a good (and free) program for doing this? Doing a search on the forum gave me a few results, but the programs didn't support ISO. Thanks in advance.

kadatherion:
The problem with iso copies is that subtitles stored in vob/sub format are actually images, not text. As such one has to OCR them (using programs such as SubRip) to convert them into a text file. Depending on the ripping software and its OCR algorithm you may carry over some typos when it mistakes one letter for another or it misses punctuation marks, but it more or less works: as you have to translate them you are going to rewrite the lines anyway so it's a non-issue. It does also somewhat preserve the timing (with a certain margin of error), but more often than not official subs have already bad timings from the start and you anyway will have to fine tune them to prevent scene bleeding and similar issues if you wish to apply them to an encode. It's still good enough as a draft to load up into Aegisub (or whatever you use) to have everything more or less laid out and timed with the relative audio/video track so you can quickly check what is written in the subs with what is actually said in the audio.

I used SubRip a couple times in the past when I had need, but it's been a while now so I can't really say if it still is the best/a good choice among freeware options or not.

Triltaison:
Ahhh, that would explain the difficulty in finding support for ISO subs. I hadn't really done anything with them before, but was hopeful it was an easy extraction. Guess that's shot all to hell.  ::)

Majorly appreciate the detailed response. If it at least works in the way I need, that qualifies as "Good" at this point. Like I said, I don't need to worry about the timing or anything since I basically just need the script itself. You said typos and punctuation can get lost, but do you know if accent marks get picked up at all? I ask because the sub language is Italian, which is chock full of accented vowels. If it doesn't pick them up at all, it'd just be good to know from the get-go.

And again, thanks.

datora:
.
I'm sure I've run across a few topics here asking questions about OCR & scanning hard subs out of video files.  Definitely try some more searches along those lines, especially in the help & uploaders' forums as well as tech.  Since I've not tried it, I can't speak to specific topics because I didn't follow them in any detail.

Learning this is on my "to do" list.  Way down on my "to do" list, even though I really want to get the time for it eventually.

Triltaison:
Thanks, datora. Now I know to look for that, rather than ISO related stuff (which pretty much gave me nothing useful). Guess it's time to whip out the ol' video converter and make me some hardsubs.

-And it's been on my "to do" list as well, so I guess I'll actually get to check it off finally.  ;)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page