[SOLVED]Extracting DVD subtitles

Havin_it · Last edited by Havin_it on Sun Nov 04, 2018 2:51 am; edited 1 time in total

Hi,

I usually rip DVDs with Handbrake, but a particular disc is proving problematic. It's a French-language film (Taxi, 1998) and ghb can't detect any subtitle track. The subtitles are displayed perfectly when playing the disc in VLC or mplayer.

I had a look at the data files on the disc, and there are .IFO and .BUP files (which are identical to each other) to match each .VOB file in the VIDEO_TS folder. GNU file tells me these are subtitle files. However I can't load these manually into Handbrake as it only takes .srt files as external input, and I haven't found any app that can convert or otherwise work with them. (I did find info that avidemux could do a two-step conversion, but the version in portage seems pretty broken and doesn't have the options mentioned in its documentation for doing this.)

I have found some .srt downloads for this film, but the user-ratings for them are poor and I'd like to crack the problem of extracting the subtitles that are on the disc if I can, as I've got other DVDs which may present the same issue.

Any advice would be welcome.

Jaglover · Posted: Wed Sep 05, 2018 12:19 pm Post subject:

To my knowledge the DVD subtitles are bitmaps, so you need some sort of text recognition software to convert them into text (srt).
Avidemux dropped this feature, the documentation is outdated.
You may have better luck using Gaupol to fix the srt files to your liking, it is very versatile tool and can do practically anything needed. You will need this tool even if you decide to convert from bitmaps, because there will be lots of errors.
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P.Kosunen · Guru Joined: 21 Nov 2005 Posts: 309 Location: Finland

MakeMKV rips also subtitles.

Havin_it · Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2018 11:11 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the replies guys, sorry I didn't get a chance to reply for a while (hate it when life impinges on more important things lol).

Having had no further success with the tools you mentioned, I was about to try something else when I realised what was up. The DVD subs are actually burned-in to the video track (hence why Handbrake couldn't find the track, although it's odd that ffprobe did indicate presence of a subtitle track ... anyhoo...).

Thing is, the subs were positioned in the lower margin of the frame (black area) which Handbrake was auto-cropping when transcoding. Soooo, all I needed to do was disable this, and reduce the cropping on the bottom so the sub lines were still in view.

This is a foreign-language film (as is the other DVD I have from this publisher, Prism Leisure) so I'm not so bothered about the subs being burned-in. Would be a bit annoying otherwise.