Burning subtitles into a ripped movie........

knightofdreamz · Forum God Joined: 16 May 2007 Posts: 201 Karma: +2 (2)

First off. Lets make sure whenever you rip a movie that you have subtitles selected to english. This will take the subtitles and place it in a secondary file. After this you will need to conjoin the movie and the subs.... This is a step by step visual guide to placing subtitles in a movie.

Burning subtitles to an AVI file

First you will need to download the following freeware programs.

VirtualDub
VobSub subtitle rendering package (main site down) - get it at http://www.divx-digest.com/software/vobsub.html
Subtitle Workshop (not strictly required, but useful) for converting between subtitle formats and fixing problematic subtitle files

So, lets get on with some subtitling. My first project was to edit some subtitles. Anyone who is into East Asian cinema will be upset at the quality of many subtiles on Region 3 DVDs and may want to edit them to remove spelling mistakes, change words etc. For instance, I was recently watching a Region 2 version of Kurosawas' Yojimbo, but all the way through, the retainers (well, more like street thugs in this case) were constantly referred to as boxers, which is certainly a strange choice of words!

To begin, install / extract VirtualDub to a directory of your choice. Once VirtualDub is installed, install VobSub.

When installing VobSub, make sure that, as shown below, you've included the "VobSub for Virtual Dub" plugin and the "TextSub for Virtual Dub" plugin. The VobSub plugin uses the subtitles ripped from DVD's to burn to your movie, the TextSub plugin uses various subtitle files which you can download freely from websites or on file sharing networks. Of course, these subtitle files are often of poor quality as they have been translated by amateurs.

Once the software is installed, we can continue.

The next stage is to load a video file into VirtualDub, by simply using the File ] Open menu command. For the purposes of this demo, I will be subtitling a Battle Royale II DivX movie with SMIL format subtitles.

Once you have loaded one AVI file into VirtualDub, you may want to append another AVI sequence onto the end (File ] Append AVI Segment). This is very useful for two disc movies (two 700MB AVI files) you want to fit onto a single DVDR disc for uninterrupted watching on your standalone player. If you need to join your subtitle files together, then URUSofts' Subtitle Workshop will do that just fine.

Next we need to add our subtitle filter, so select Video ] Filters from the drop down menu and a dialog box will appear with an empty list of filters. Click the "Add" button and a new dialog box will appear with a list of filters. If TextSub is not available in the list, click the Load button and find the *.vdf file in the VobSub program files directory (Gabest).

Double click the TextSub list item and a dialog box titled TextSub settings will appear.

Click the "Open" button to load the subtitles appropriate to the movie, then click "OK" and "OK" again to get back to the main VirtualDub screen.

The next thing to check is that the video is set to "Full Processing Mode" (check under the Video menu) and to choose our output compression (Video ] Compression) or your new AVI file will be saved as uncompressed video, taking up gigabytes of space. DivX 5 works fine for me.

The audio can be left as "Direct Stream Copy" unless you want to recompress the audio too.

Next, you can either preview the output by clicking the output play button or skip that and hit "Save As AVI" on the File menu.

The software will then chug away for a while rendering your subtitles to the movie!
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