[MPlayer-users] extracting subtitles

[Rich Felker]

On Sat, Mar 25, 2006 at 06:56:33PM +0000, Raphael wrote:
> RC wrote:
> > On Sat, 25 Mar 2006 17:20:36 +0000
> > Raphael <mencoder at lesshaste.plus.com> wrote:
> >
> >   
> >> "[open] number of subtitles on disk: 0" which makes no sense as the
> >> film is in French with subtitles.
> >>     
> >
> > Are the subtitles hard-coded perhaps?  ie. Do they show up when you play
> > the DVD with no -sid or -slang options?
> >   
> Sadly I think they might be. Yes they do show up and they even stay
> there after I disable subtitles by pressing "v". What is weird is that
> ALL my DVDs appear to have hard coded subtitles (which is what made me
> suspicious that the fault is with mplayer)!

It should probably make you suspicious that your DVDs are bootleg.. :)

> I don't suppose there is a tool for extracting hard coded subtitles?
> Technically it should be easy as they sit in the black border below the
> video...

Ah, you're very lucky. Normally they're on top of the picture which
really ruins it. Try this: use the crop filter to crop out the movie
and show just the subtitles. Then use the decimate filter to remove
duplicate frames. Then use -vo png to save the subtitles to files, and
an OCR program to convert the results to text. You can probably come
up with a way to automate getting the timestamps of the subtitles
too..

Rich