Re: [dev] Writing subtitles for videos

From: Kamil Cholewiński <harry666t_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 13:52:54 +0200

Background: a close friend is doing subtitling for $, usually for local
film festivals. One festival often means dozens of movies to be
translated and subtitled. Most people doing this are freelance
translators with limited technical background.

> ffplay prints the playback time in centisecond precision to the terminal
> when it is playing, so you can pause to see where in the video you are
> and write the time down yourself.

No, this is beyond stupid. Try this when you have dozens of hours of
video to subtitle, on a deadline. You want this activity to be as
streamlined as humanly possible. There's no room for philosophy here,
the people doing this are already tired.

The current de-facto state of the art is to hit a key to show-next/hide
the subtitle while the video is playing. This can be done live while the
film is being displayed at a theater, or pre-recorded (possibly with
time-stretched playback).

> I haven't editted a lot of subtitles, but for sound synchronization, a
> waveform is extremely useful.

Now this is an interesting idea and I think extending existing software
with this functionality would make it somewhat more usable.

Any improvement that takes away a part of the manual labor would be
awesome. Using machine learning, or speech recognition, to auto-suggest
subtitle timing? Hell fucking yeah, that would seriously rock.

<3,K.
Received on Thu Aug 31 2017 - 13:52:54 CEST