I have a 4 box set of DVDs for the Korean TV drama, Jumong. Volumes 1 and 3 are the original Korean product, with 3 episodes per disk, high quality video and good English subtitles. Vols 2 and 4, on the other hand, are a Chinese version with 4 episodes crammed onto each disk by means of high compression and by cutting off the intros and codas for each episode. The subtitles are in Chinese and "English". The English subtitles are ridiculous, amusing at first but quickly becoming unbearable. I have a good set of external .srt files in English which I'm trying to sync with the video using Subtitle Workshop 2.51 but having problems with any of the standard methods, which I'll post in a separate thread. I'm aware that the best method is to sync with a subtitle file that's already synced if one is available, and obviously the one I need is embedded right on the disk. I'm also aware that I can rip it from the video files using SubRip but, although it may quicker and easier to use than similar programs, it seems excessively time consuming and labor intensive for my needs. I don't need a faithful copy of the subs, don't even need words, just the timing for the purpose of syncing. Can anyone advise me on getting quick results, either with SubRip or by some other means?
DVDSubEdit lets you load the movie ( File > Open full domain) and select the sub stream. On the lower right, click 'Run OCR. then 'Save as srt'. It's quite fast.
Thanks, attar, I appreciate the link and I'll give that program a try. The good news for me with SubRip is that, since the disks I'm working with are in a series, I've discovered that saving the character set for the first in the series allows me to do the other ten pretty much without attendance. The bad news is that, whether I load the resulting .srt file in MPC-HC as an eternal subtitle or whether I load it in Subtitle Workshop, it's out of sync with the DVD from which I ripped it, so that I can't use it to sync the good subtitle! I find that both mystifying and depressing. I'm having all kinds of problems using Subtitle Workshop and getting external subs to work with these disks. I guess I'll try to isolate the various problems I'm having and post them in separate threads.
You can use SubtitleCreator to sync a .srt file to an existing DVD. The drawback is that you have to demux the the Video/audio/subs using the likes of PgcDemux. Load the new unsynced .srt files in SubtitleCreator then select the demuxed .sup file as the reference. The newly synced files are now saved in .sup format and the DVD is authored using MuxMan. I've used it and it's less complicated than it sounds - but I was using Dutch and English which are relatively simple to match up in the two lists.