Subtitle Creation

This guide focuses on creating subtitles that are overlayed over video. That is different from creating them inside a Video Editing application and placing each title and rendering it so that it is burned into the image.

Playing Subtitles

Overlayed subtitles can be played in three main ways. These ways are accessed in a very similar way using VLC player

DVD Subtitles as subtitle streams

Playing subtitles in DVDs is often a matter of selecting the right language from the DVD title menu or using the remote control. We offer help here in using the Open source DVD player VLC.

Using Vlc to play subtitled DVDs

As separate subtitles files (like *.srt files)

The method for playing subtitles which are seperate text files is very similar.

Using Vlc to play a video file with an external subtitle file

Video containers like Matroska (subtitles are selectable)

Matroska files have the subtitle files embedded with the video files. They are very useful and should get used much more beyond the pirate Anime community where they are very common.

Using Vlc to play subtitled Matroska files

Creating Subtitles

Subtitles on DVDs are overlayed as image streams. This means that you have to use a tool to convert them back to text before you can start to edit or translate them. The are a couple of tools to do that.

You may also wish to edit or translate subtitles and you'll need a subtitle editing programme to do that.

Extracting DVD Subtitles as Srt files using Avidemux

Systems: Windows, Mac, Linux

Avidemux can select a subtitles stream from a DVD and save it as series of image files. Then it use an OCR (optical character recognition) tool to convert it to text.

Extracting DVD subtitles