What to expect at the end of this chapter

• Know what a subtitle is
• Different kinds of subtitles
• Formats subtitles can take 
• Write basic subtitles for a video

What are subtitles?

Subtitles are textual versions of the dialog or commentary in films, television programs, video games, and the like, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen. They can be a written translation of the video dialog in a foreign language or a rendering of the dialog in the original language often targeting viewers who are deaf, hard-of-hearing or have accent recognition problems.

Different types of subtitles

1) Burned-in subtitles (or "hard subs")

These are subtitles that are built-in to the image and cannot be removed as they totally become part of the image. Now that they are built-in to the image, there is no way to make them disappear properly, as they're totally part of the image.

2) Soft subtitles

They are hidden within the video file and not built-in to the image thus can be removed temporarily, if not required, using the video player menu. You may find different languages for these soft subtitles (for example up to 8 different languages in the same AVI!) Those soft subtitles will appear in subtitle menu of your player and the viewer can select which ever suits their needs.

3) External subtitles

These are external individual files: most usual are .srt files (which contain only 1 language) or the couple of files .sub + .idx that may contain up to 32 different languages!)

Most often, if you want those external subtitles files to be opened automatically when the video file is opened in a player, then subtitles file should have the same name as the movie file. For example:

 Open Video Tutorial.avi <= the movie file

Open Video Tutorial.srt <= the external subtitle file

Playing Video Captions Online

Many video sharing systems allow you to play captions and subtitles on top of your video files. The used of closed captions allow you to choose different language possibilities rather than having only the subtitles of only one language burned into your video. Below we can see a video with English subtitles selected.

The same video shown on the Papuan Voices website has been translated into many languages. These can be selected in the online video player.

The system for displaying and creating subtitles used by the Papuan Voices website is Amara which is hosted on universalsubtitles.org

We can see that this page allows you to download the video file and the subtitle files separately. We will do this in our mission to understand more about how these kinds of subtitles work.

Click on the Download Subtitle link. We will be given the option to open or save a subtitle file of the type .srt.

If we open up the file that we download we will see that it is really pretty simple listing times and the text to be displayed over the video.

Playing SRT Subtitles Offline with VLC player

Now that we have downloaded our video file and subtitle file we can also download them on our desktop computer.

To do this, open your video file in VLC player. If you subtitle file is in the same directory and called a very similar name to your video file, it may be automactially recoginised and played by VLC. If not then you can select Video >

Creating Subtiles Online

At univeralsubtitles.org you can create subtitles online. The process is quite easy and intuative, and there are step by step instructions on the website.

The work area is shown below.

The workflow has 4 stages.

• Typing
• Syncing
• Edit Title and Description
• Checking Work
   

Other Ways of Creating SRT Files

SRT files have been widely adopted for this reason. They are simple and they do the job well. There are many tools on the desktop which we can use to create these files. Jubler, Subtitle Workshop, Gnome subtitles. This can be handy if we want to subtitle our files off line. 

Task

Use Amara or a desktop subtitler to create an srt subtitle file and play it in VLC to test it.